AstraZeneca
At the American College of Cardiology (ACC) meeting this weekend, the company presented further data to show that the drug yielded a 43% drop in the risk of venous thromboembolism (VTE), like blood clots that can form in the leg and possibly travel to the lungs.
That sounds good … until you get to the gritty details. There were 17,802 people in the study, and only 94 got VTE -- 60 in the placebo group, and 34 that were taking Crestor. The risk and level of patients getting VTE is low enough that I'm not convinced that the data will sway too many doctors to put their patients on Crestor.
Even if doctors are convinced that Crestor's effects are worth handing the drug out like candy, it seems likely that these positive effects would also be present in other statins, the class of drugs to which Crestor belongs. Unfortunately for Crestor, Merck's
If doctors favor statins for their extra perceived clot-preventing benefits, non-statin cholesterol drugs such as Abbott Labs'
Sales of Crestor have been doing quite well -- up 29% year over year last year -- but I doubt that Jupiter will send those figures to the moon.
You'll heart this Foolishness: