JUPITER may yet change practice

doi:10.1136/bmj.a2921

Published 10 December 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a2921
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a2921

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JUPITER study

JUPITER may yet change practice

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Donner-Banzhoff and Sönnichsen temper the hype followingthe publication of the JUPITER trial,¹ but other issues arealso problematic:

It is hard to find a good reason to stop the study early, giventhe low absolute benefit
The mortality data show an even lowerabsolute reduction of0.25% (number needed to treat (NNT) 400).Curiously, a shorttime before the study was interrupted thereduction was onlyaround 0.1% (NNT=1000)
The competing interestsare staggering. For example, the firstauthor and chair of thesteering committee is a co-inventorof the high sensitivityC reactive protein test, which has beenlicensed to AstraZeneca.

JUPITER should simply be discarded as irrelevant and at bestdoubtful in its conclusions. In fact, it could be regarded asevidence that statins are probably much less effective thanwe want to believe. Indeed, in the CORONA trial rosuvastatincompared with placebo showed no benefit on . . . [Full text of this article]

Mikael Rabaeus, medical director¹

¹ Health Management Centre, Clinique de Genolier, 1272 Genolier, Switzerland

mrabaeus@genolier.net

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