Quote from Mark1e:

It doesn't matter how tight the correlation is, you simply can't assume causality.
Cheers,

Mark :rolleyes:

[[COLOR="Sienna"]Removed] I have never argued that cholesterol is the de facto cause of anything. I do believe the data, which does show that incidence of death from a MI is lower in patients with lower cholesterol, all other things being equal. Whether cholesterol is the cause of CAD or not is immaterial to me. The ultimate underlying cause, for now, and IMO, is unknown, so I can't really do anything with my own health about that (although I do not rule out the possibility that it is the elevated serum cholesteral levels that are themselves at least one cause of atherosclerosis) . I can lower my cholesterol, and hence lower my risk of a (recurrent, in my case) MI however - the data on that is very clear.

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P.S. the ASCOT-LLA group on the atorvastatin (lipitor) saw a 1 year reduction in LDL of 34.6%, and a 3 year reduction of 33.7%. The placebo group saw a 4% reduction over 3 years (some 9% had begun taking non-study statins during the trial).

I too had an A in statistics. I do also know that the numerous variables that they are using in their tests require a much, much , much larger pool of "volunteers" than they are using. I have also read many of the numerous reports on cholesterol.. Many of them start out with "it is a well know fact that cholesterol causes heart disease"....These are read; however, they carry the same sticker as "funded by a drug company". Knowing statistics you should know how easy it is to regroup items to come out with the desired result. I'm not saying that this is the way to do a test...guite the contrary. However, I have seen some of the major tests, where women were deleted from the results because their results were insignificant. Others where anti-inflammatories were given along with the statins (to some of the participants), but were not broken down in the results. Other tests were breast cancer increased by 1500% (CARE Trial). They explained this a just a fluke....???? Other statin study tests where the control goup was allowed to start taking a statin (of their choice) while in the study. AS far as the Wonderful Anglo-acandinavian study. The study was designed to assess the benefits of atorvastatin versus a placebo in patients who had high blood presssure with the average or lower-than-average cholesterol and at least three other cardiovascular risk factors. The trial was originally planned for 5 years, but was stopped after a median follow-up of 3.3 years because of a significant reduction in cardiac events. Lipitor did reduce toatl myocardial infarction and total stroke: however , total mortality was not significantly reduced. In fact, women were worse off with treatment. The trial report stated that total serious adverse events "did not differ between patients assigned atorvastatin or placebo" but did not supply the actual numbers of serious events. This might have been a been a double blind trial...but the people posting the results were triple blind. THe J-LIT trial (japanese lipid intervention trial was a 6 year study of 47,294 patients treated with the same dose of sivastatin. Patiens were grouped by the amount of cholesterol lowering. Some patients had no reduction, in LDL levels, some had a moderate fall in LDL and some had very large LDL reductions. THe results: no correlation between the amount of LDL lowering and death rate at five years. Those with LDL cholesterol lower than 80 had a death rate of just over 3.5 at five years; those whose LDL was over 200 had a death rate of just over 3.5 at five years. As far as Alice in Wonderland, i prefer to live on Fantasy Island. Somewhere where i hope people will read an entire trial, and not just the results. A place people will not take someone's word for cholesterol causing heart disease and build their test from there, but where they will confirm that cholesterol does indeed cause heart disease and does not merely share a relationship of unknown sorts. As the one person said "skid marks do not cause accidents".