Does Niacin work or not ? You hear folks that are selling supplements
saying , "oh yes niacin works!" But then these guys are on the internet. But here's a
guy on the Internet "AIM HIGH falls short on niacin debate".
it's on YouTube . it was July 6 2012. He was actually the author of the key study
the doctors quote to say. " Niacin doesn't work." He said basically, " I'm afraid
doctors - cardiologists are gonna see this, the results of our study
in the New England Journal, and think, ' AIM HIGH says that niACIN didn't work', and they're
gonna quit prescribing niacin. And that would be a mistake." He was right they did
see the study. they did quit prescribing niacin. and it is a mistake.
now we're gonna go into some more detail on on this study. why it was a mistake
and basically some of the key focus points around the niacin debate. this is
part 2 of a series on it. now I'll describe other videos in this series a
little bit later but this is the first study. This is the study " niacin in
patients with low HDL cholesterol levels receiving intensive statin therapy" New
England Journal 2011. again we're still being impacted by the results of
that study nowAIM HIGH - the M in AIM HIGH. ( these names are always acronyms) the
M and AIM HIGH stands for metabolic syndrome. So there are a couple of things
to think about here. Before we even get into this study - we're talking about
metabolic syndrome patients. we're talking about low HDL. Why would they
have a low HDL? we've got several videos you've seen them before triglyceride
over HDL ratio in people with high blood & sugar metabolic syndrome.
if your blood Sugar's high your HDL drops & your triglycerides increase
because insulin stops your body from burning . .. - I mean from burning
triglycerides. It burns up HDL.... while insulin is active . given
that my view of these studies - & this study is very obvious right up fron.
It gets back to what you've heard John say. He's lived it. .. And I've lived it.
We both continue to put this out in our videos. You cannot supplement away out of a bad
lifestyle. So that was the goal with - and that's what happened with the AIM HIGH
stud. Basically they took people that had metabolic syndrome - they had low HDL
they had been on statins for several years and they were wondering if adding
niacin would further help. It didn't. Here's another point to remember about
the AIM HIGH study. not only did the study group get niacin - the control group
got a very small amount of niacin. Why would they give the control group in the
AIM HIGH study niacin? here's the reason : as we all know you can get
flushing with a niacin. so in order to keep the patients - the study
subjects from understanding that they had niacin - they gave them just enough to
cause the cutaneous flush. Well - was that just enough to have an impact?
Hmm - could have been. Here's another interesting question about about the aim
high study they they stopped the study after just a
couple of years and the perspective on there's tons of there's tons of research
that shows that niacin works but it's more of a 10-year type of impact they
stopped this study after 36 months. So, even if they were going to
have a significant niacin effect they would not have seen it at this point.
There are several reasons why the AIM HIGH study just brings up a lot of
questions and why doc's should dig a little bit deeper before they just start
quoting a single study - and changing their practice based on it. In fact one
good idea would be to listen to the editorial of the guy that wrote the
study maybe you wouldn't change your practice so quickly and maybe you
wouldn't misinterpret the article so quickly. but again - we're all busy. I
understand why that happens. Thank you very much for your interest!