Doctors often ignore complains about statins

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Physicians Often Ignore, Dismiss Patient Complaints About Possible Side Effects Of Statins, Survey Finds

Catégorie "Non classé" - 31-07-2009

 

Physicians often ignore or give someone the old heave-ho tolerant complaints about possible side effects of statins, according to a study published mould week in the newspaper Drug Safe keeping, the Washington Post reports. For the study, researchers led by Beatrice Golomb, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California-San Diego, surveyed 650 patients, most of whom were in their early 60s and lived in the U.S. Most participants said they complained to their physicians about muscle pain, memory loss, numbness in their hands and feet, or other possible side effects of statins, the workroom build. However, participants said in most cases their physicians attributed the symptoms to aging, denied their link with statins or dismissed them, according to the analyse. Golomb said, “Person after person spontaneously (told) us that their doctors told them that symptoms akin to muscle pain couldn’t be enduring come from the drug. We were surprised at how customary that experience was.” She attributed the results of the study in part to a lack of awareness relative to the side effects of statins. “Ad campaigns that preserve statins’ miracle drug concept are more strong than education about side effects,” Golomb said. Implications The study raises concerns about prescription drug safety because, when physicians fail to link symptoms with medications, they do not file adverse event reports with FDA. As a result, FDA might “underestimate the problem, and other doctors and patients may assume the drug is safer than it is,” the Post reports. Jerry Avorn — a Harvard Medical School professor and author of the book “Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks and Costs of Prescription Drugs” — said that “there is horrendous underreporting of side effects,” adding that 90% to 99% of “serious side effects are not reported by doctors.” The study “points out that doctor reports on side effects [are] a very unreliable means of learning about the true extent of problems,” he said, adding, “We ought to have a (better) mechanism for gathering information from patients. A lot of it will be noise, but there may be important signals there as well” (Ganguli, Washington Post, 8/28).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org

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