Vytoringate Redux: Congress Fires Off More Letters

[Celebration]

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/02/11/vytoringate-redux-congress-fires-off-more-letters/

Congress, Merck and Schering-Plough are becoming pen pals.

John Dingell and Bart Stupak, leaders of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, have sent off some new notes to the two companies about that controversial Enhance trial of their cholesterol drug Vytorin.

In one letter, they ask about some posts on Cafe Pharma, a Web site frequented by drug reps, which seem to indicate some people knew the results of the failed study as long ago as March 13, 2007. (For more on those posts, check out the BrandweekNRX blog. The March 13 message said: “have a buddy at . He says that the study is a bust.”)

“These Web site entries are obviously troubling and raise again the question of whether anyone within Merck or Schering-Plough knew the results of the Enhance trial prior to the official release of data in the January 14, 2008, press release,” the congressmen write.

They also sent a note to Cafe Pharma’s webmaster and the chief executive of SoftLayer Technologies, requesting information on the identities of those who wrote the posts in question.

[flamin lib]

1. I was taking Vytorin and when the study was released I started

digging-Google is your friend.

1. It's almost impossible for a lay person to get at the raw data.

2. When you do it shows that statins only help one person out of 100. Lipitor claims 36% decrease in heart attack and has an *. Read the * and it says in a double blind study 100 people treated with a placebo had 3 heart attacks in 5 years. 100 people treated with Lipitor had 2 heart attacks.

3. People with normal cholesterol who have heart disease symptoms benefit from statins with a 30% reduction in second heart attacks. It appears that cholesterol is not the disease vector, that there is some other aspect of statins that affects heart disease.

4. Of the 100 people in the Lipitor study 3-5% exhibited some side effect including headache, digestive difficulties, impotence, liver damage, kidney damage, cognitive loss, muscle pain, joint pain and worst of all deterioration of the heart muscle.

I was never warned of any side effect other than liver damage even though 1% of patients suffer heart damage if they show symptoms of muscle pain and continue taking the drug.

I no longer take statins.

[Celebration]

2. here is an update

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/02/13/pharma-chat-board-has-nothing-for-congress-on-vytorin/?mod=homeblogmod_healthblog

Last week, Congress sent a letter to Cafe Pharma asking about who those anonymous commenters were. Yesterday, the site’s Web master wrote a couple of posts on the site explaining that Cafe Pharma doesn’t collect information on anonymous commenters, and that none of the comments in question came from registered users.

“We will not have any user information to provide related to anonymous posts, since we have not recorded any such information,” she wrote in this post.

First of all, wouldn't a subpeona be necessary to get this? Secondly, even if they didn't "record" the information, wouldn't there be a record of the ISP that posted somewhere? (I'm not that well informed on tech issues like this).