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.
Related links:
- The JUPITER trial: Rosuvastatin to Prevent Vascular Events in Men and Women with Elevated C-Reactive Protein. NEJM, November 2008.
- Expanding the Orbit of Primary Prevention — Moving beyond JUPITER
- Breaking News: The Jupiter Trial. Clinical Correlations: The NYU Internal Medicine Blog