"evaluate the effect of cholesterol lowering with simvastatin on mortality and morbidity in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD)"
The important bit is that everyone there started with heart problems. If you have heart problems, your risk of dying in 5 years goes down from 12% to 8% and your risk of having a heart attack goes down from 28% to 19%. I'd be sold on the idea of statins if I had heart disease.
In order to to see whether it made sense to give statins to everyone they took a bunch of Welsh men who hadn't had a heart attack and gave some of them statins. The study showed it helped. The catch though is that apparently welsh men are some of the people most likely to have heart attacks, so it was a little like taking a group of people who had heart problems (you know you're going to find a few, and you suspect from the above that you're going to help that subset by about 10%)
no subject
The important bit is that everyone there started with heart problems. If you have heart problems, your risk of dying in 5 years goes down from 12% to 8% and your risk of having a heart attack goes down from 28% to 19%. I'd be sold on the idea of statins if I had heart disease.
(here's another study, not the one I'm looking for: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMoa0807646 )
In order to to see whether it made sense to give statins to everyone they took a bunch of Welsh men who hadn't had a heart attack and gave some of them statins. The study showed it helped. The catch though is that apparently welsh men are some of the people most likely to have heart attacks, so it was a little like taking a group of people who had heart problems (you know you're going to find a few, and you suspect from the above that you're going to help that subset by about 10%)