[hga]

Well, to a certain degree the Jupiter study indicts itself, at least at brief glance. It uses a surrogate endpoint, not actual disease or mortality. As I understand it, large dose niacin used to promoted as good for your heart based on more iffy lipid surrogates, but when a real study was done, it turned out to increase mortality. Oops.

And while I'm not so influenced by "the drug company paid for it!" bit, Crestor's situation is special, it was introduced when earlier well studied statins had gone generic (or nearly so). It had to muscle its way in, so to speak. So I view it with extra jaundice in my eye (tempered by the fact that it's brand name, so you know you're going to get the real stuff at the right dose, and in my recent study of statins it's clear that bad side effects are very strongly correlated with inadvertent overdosing).

Anyway, if an iffy source says something, as long as you can track down what it claims to be quoting then you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand. Given that it's peppered with links to PubMed....

I myself am looking at statins (for primary prevention, pushed by my doctors with some justice) with a jaundiced eye, based on how far their target is from actual cholesterol production. They interfere with a lot more than that.