Why don’t we just put statins in the water supply and be done with it?

Statins and the risk of colorectal cancer in last week’s NEJM is a case-control study from Israel that looked at about 2000 patients with colorectal cancer and a similar number of controls, and found that “the use of statins for at least five years (vs. the nonuse of statins) was associated with a significantly reduced …

Multidetector spiral CT for PE

Last week’s NEJM has an article, from Switzerland and France, on multidetector-row computed tomography in suspected pulmonary embolism. Rationale The authors state that first-generation, single-detector, spiral CT scanning is quite specific (90%) but not very sensitive (70%) for detecting pulmonary emboli. In two previous studies by their group, negative CT scans were contradicted by positive …