Antiarrhythmic drugs caused hundreds of thousands of premature deaths

Evidence

The problem was that far from preventing heart attack death, antiarrhythmics had the opposite effect. It has since been estimated that their usage may have caused hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. The Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial, conducted by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, began in 1986 and, unlike previous studies, used premature death as the endpoint. The testing of antiarrhythmics in this trial actually had to be discontinued ahead of schedule because of the significant increase in the death rate among participants assigned to take them. — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age, 410

Categorization

• XREF: Provides the concrete casualty figure for what happens when industry selects for convenient trial endpoints instead of death rates — a shocking quantification of methodological choices. — connects to: The medical debate over chronic Lyme threatens lives on both sides — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 232