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ACC: Placebo Challenge for Statin Intolerance?

— Cardiologists debate whether strategy might work in the clinic too

MedpageToday

CHICAGO -- The GAUSS-3 trial again demonstrated PCSK9 inhibitor superiority to other options for cutting cholesterol in truly statin-intolerant people, but perhaps its greater contribution was that a blinded placebo challenge indicated that intolerable muscle symptoms reported with multiple statins actually didn't stem from the statin for about 60% of patients.

So why couldn't such a protocol, as reported here at the , be used in the clinic? In this video, Steven E. Nissen, C. Noel Bairey-Merz, and Fred Masoudi argue different perspectives, both for and against.