Experts around the globe comment the JUPITER trial in the correspondence section of the March 5, 2009 issue of the  NEJM. I collect here some of the most relevant and interesting correspondence to the editor.

“JUPITER is notable for the unacknowledged exclusion of a population that may be at increased risk for dose-related adverse effects of rosuvastatin.”

Adriane Fugh-Berman, M.D.
Georgetown University Medical Center
Washington, DC 20007
ajf29@georgetown.edu 

“JUPITER was stopped early, after a median follow-up of 1.9 years. The number of patients who would need to be treated for 2 years to prevent the occurrence of one primary end point was 95. Ridker et al. extrapolate these results by a projection over a 5-year treatment period. This estimation should be viewed critically, since the study has most of  the characteristics of a  truncated trial”.
“The majority of randomized clinical trials that are stopped early because of an observed benefit of the treatment under investigation are industry-funded drug trials that are stopped at the first interim analysis, with  the results published  in a high-impact medical journal”.

Luc A. Pierard, M.D., Ph.D.
University Hospital Sart Tilman
B 4000 Liege, Belgium
lpierard@chu.ulg.ac.be

Read the correspondence section for further comments.

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