https://www.newscientist.com/article/2087983-computer-glitch-has-led-to-incorrect-advice-on-statins/
Terry Mathews/Alamy Stock Photo
It’s been branded a farce. A software error means an unknown number of people in the UK have been told to take cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins when they didn’t need to – or told they didn’t need to consider taking them when they should have done.
It’s the latest twist in the long-running row about whether apparently healthy people should take statins to lower their risk of heart attack and stroke.
Statins have been prescribed for decades to people who have had a heart attack or stroke and high cholesterol levels, to reduce their risk of having a second one.
More recently they have been recommended for people who haven’t had a heart attack but have a 10 per cent or greater chance of having one in the next 10 years, because of risk factors like smoking, being overweight or having a family history of these conditions.
But the drug’s expanding use has been controversial. Statins can cause muscle pain and fatigue, and can even trigger type 2 diabetes in a small minority of people. Critics say that the drugs might do more harm than good if given to people at a relatively low risk of heart attack.
Now it seems that doctors in the UK may have been miscalculating which people have a 10 per cent or higher risk of a heart attack or stroke in the next decade.
To work this out, doctors use an equation that weighs up a person’s risk factors. Although this is freely available online, about one in three UK family doctors’ practices use a computer program made by the IT company TPP instead.
Software error
Last month the firm told the UK government that there is a problem with the software, and it has been overstating the risk for some people, while understating it for others. The government informed GPs of this on Wednesday.
“Only a limited number of patients are potentially affected,” a government spokesperson told New Scientist, but they admitted the company had not revealed what proportion of test results were wrong.
The software has been used since 2009.
According to guidelines from the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, doctors should discuss the pros and cons of taking statins with patients – the decision shouldn’t be based on risk calculations alone.
But GPs often don’t have much time for that in their average 10-minute appointments, says Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist in London. “People are told ‘If you don’t take this statin you may die’.”
Malhotra and other critics say GPs are pushed into prescribing statins, through guidelines and targets. They also claim the frequency of side effects is unknown, because the drug companies won’t release all the data from their clinical trials.
Now it seems that some people may have been advised to take statins unnecessarily, that compounds the problem, says Malhotra. “It’s essential to use the best available data to assess the risk of developing cardiovascular disease,” he says.