Inflammation: Medicine's burning question

> The United Kingdom Lipid Clinics Programme study of 2508 subjects found that, with diet alone, 60 percent of subjects had a mean reduction in body weight of 1.8 percent, which was associated with 5 to 7 percent reductions in serum total and LDL-C.

Key thing here: when I mentioned "otherwise healthy" above that includes "not overweight and exercises." Lifestyle interventions for people with hypercholesterolemia are most effective on people who are both sedentary and overweight (or obese) who have really poor diets. None of that applies to me.

The conclusion that I ultimately came to is that, if your diet isn't awful, your BMI is normal, and you exercise every now and then, there's no dietary change that's likely to benefit by more than 5%, not enough in my case to reach normal levels. This is my "gut" assessment based on personal research and I urge you to do your own research on this matter before making any decisions.

To further complicate all of this and bring things back to the topic of this article: statins seem to reduce the risk of CVD through some means other than simply lowering cholesterol levels. There's a school of thought that even people with normal cholesterol who have other risk factors for CVD should be on statins.

So really, the question of "should I take statins" may end up being less about cholesterol specifically, and more about overall risk of CVD. This is why in my own decision making process I opted not to pursue treatment (yet) since my overall health otherwise is sound.

E.g., while at med school, they are warned against Zebras[0] so much that while practicing they will often ignore anything with a 1-in-a-million-chance unless the false-positive rate is zero. It does minimize the overall error rate, but for the person who has the 1-in-a-million condition, this is no comfort -- and that person is often in a position to evaluate that condition better than the GP (if they are scientifically literate).

I have been told by a senior doctor at one of the leading US hospitals to "cut the internet cord so that I don't confuse myself as I am not trained to understand the articles I find". Turned out said doctor did not understand the statistical inference criterion, and I did -- unsurprisingly, since I have the mathematical background, and they do not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_%28medicine%29

For example, I on your original post, I was trying to figure out if you meant "Computer Scientists are theoreticians" through the details. If you're not going to outright say something straight to the point, the details better be clear so that one can understand the implication.

That's a good thing too.

Unless the "latest research" actual distills down to common practice, it's usually unproven junk, even if it managed to get published in "peer reviewed journals".

In fact several meta-studies have found over 80% of the papers that are published in such journals are wrong and/or non-reproducible. As for research results that made it to Nature or similar pop science magazines those are usually even more journalistic than scientific.

Think of a research "getting into the hands of the doctors actually practicing medicine" as a filtering process to weed out the BS.

Here's how it works:

A team of some inexperienced postgraduates hastily follow some idea tossed around by a professor who doesn't really follow their progress or care that much, but who'll gladly slap his/hers name on the final paper. If there's a need to secure grants, the paper will tackle some important topic and better have good results.

In the way, they make one or more methodological errors, and finally send their paper to some journal. The journal editor might be friends or exchange favors to the professor, and will do what he cans to get favorable reviewers, anonymous or "anonymous".

Not that the reviewers will go into much bother checking it out, unless the paper is evidently crap. After its published, some pop science journalistic hack will cover it in the cliched "breakthrough story" format, also giving a full portrait of the professor as a restless scientific maverick (even though he merely signed the paper). The editor will then slap a blockbuster-like title to the story, and readers will enthuse about the possibilities.

Several months/years later, 3-4 other papers will tear down that one, and the cycle continues. Though sometimes wrong papers manage to get cited for decades without anyone bothering to redo and verify the original research.