By Julian Gavaghan
PUBLISHED: 18:26 GMT, 14 March 2012 | UPDATED: 14:13 GMT, 15 March 2012
Britain is in danger of becoming a nation of pill-poppers, a leading academic has warned.
Professor Sarah Harper, director of Oxford University’s institute of population ageing, said the country’s love affair with medicine means we choose to pop pills rather than follow a healthy lifestyle.
She cited the widespread use of cholesterol-busting statins, taken by up to seven millions adults that could increase the risk of a heart attack or stroke.
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| Warning: Prof Sarah Parker said we are at risk of living in a world where people increasingly depend on drugs like cholesterol-lowering statins |
She added that academics who advocate those over 45 should take low-dose aspirin to help ward off cancer may also create a medicine dependency culture.
And, in a public lecture on the world's ageing population, Prof Harper, warned: ‘I think we may be entering a world where preventable chronic disease will not be prevented by public health measures tackling lifestyles, but increasingly by drug therapies which will control and reduce symptoms of chronic disease.
‘We have to ask if we wish our future to be one where individuals at increasingly younger ages pop pills rather than eat healthily, stop smoking, reduce alcohol, and take up exercise. Do we want 10-year-olds popping statins?’
Prof Harper gave the Oxford London Lecture 2012, titled The 21st Century – the last century of youth? at the Church House Conference Centre in Westminster.
She said that the chance of children taking statins was remote. But she noted academics were tending to recommend that people took preventative drugs at an earlier and earlier age.
She told the Daily Telegraph: ‘Drug therapies are fantastic, but we have to be careful that we don't just have drugs where there are healthy living alternatives.’
Taking drugs to combat chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes came at a cost, she said - both to the individual and the taxpayer.
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Statins: The cholesterol-lowering driug are fast developing a reputation as a wonder drug |
Evidence showed that those who lived healthier lifestyles had many more healthy years than those who did not, she said, something that popping pills alone could not achieve.
Statins in particular are fast gaining a reputation as a wonder drug.
In January, research suggested that a regular dose of cholesterol-lowering drugs could help cut the risk of breast cancer.
New research found a link between a cholesterol-building mechanism in the body and disorganised cell growth characteristic of breast cancer.
Both involved defective versions of a gene called p53, which when treated with cholesterol-lowering statins stopped the invasive growth attributed to the cancer - and in some cases the genes even died.
Study leader Dr Carol Prives, from Columbia University in New York, said: 'The data raises the possibility that we might identify subsets of patients whose tumours may respond to statins.'
'Of course we can't make any definitive conclusions until we know more.
'There are great implications, but nothing clinical yet. Perhaps one could do a clinical trial, and that may support these findings, or it may be more complicated.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2115018/A-nation-addicted-statins-We-pop-pill-live-healthy-life-warns-Oxford-University-professor.html
