Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Even if you're not at high risk for a heart attack or stroke, taking statins can still cut your chances of serious heart or blood vessel problems by about the same amount as it does for people at high risk.
Quantitative
Taking statins — the pills doctors give to lower cholesterol — doesn’t make you more likely to get cancer or die from it, even if your cholesterol is already pretty low.
Causal
Taking statins to lower your 'bad' cholesterol by about 39 mg/dL can reduce your risk of dying from any cause by 9%, and it doesn’t make you more likely to die from cancer or other non-heart problems.
Taking statins to lower your 'bad' cholesterol by just a little bit can cut your chance of having a stroke by about a quarter—even if you're not at high risk to begin with—and this help comes mostly from preventing strokes caused by blood clots, not brain bleeds.
Taking statins to lower your 'bad' cholesterol by about 1 point (in mmol/L) can cut your chances of having a heart attack by nearly 40%, even if you're not at high risk for heart disease yet.
If you're at low risk for heart problems and take a statin to lower your 'bad' cholesterol by a small amount, you're about 11% less likely to have a heart attack or stroke over the next five years — out of 1000 people like you, roughly 11 fewer will have a major heart or blood vessel problem.
Taking berberine pills twice a day for 3 months lowers blood sugar levels a tiny bit more than metformin does in people who are just starting to develop prediabetes.
If you're newly diagnosed with prediabetes, taking berberine twice a day for 3 months gives you a lower chance of stomach problems (20%) than taking metformin (30%).
Correlational
Taking berberine pills twice a day for 3 months can lower your blood sugar almost as well as the diabetes drug metformin — both help bring down your fasting and after-meal sugar levels.
If you wait to take proven heart medications and instead rely on supplements that haven’t been shown to work, you’re putting yourself at higher risk for a heart attack or stroke that could have been avoided.
Just because a drug changes something measurable in your body (like a blood number) doesn’t mean it actually helps you feel better, live longer, or function better—you need proof it improves real-life outcomes.
Medicines you get from a pharmacy are tightly controlled to make sure they’re pure, have the exact right amount of active ingredient, and are proven safe — but vitamins and supplements you buy at the store don’t have to meet those same strict rules.
Descriptive
Taking berberine by mouth often gives people stomach cramps, constipation, or diarrhea because the body doesn’t absorb it well, so it sits in the gut and irritates it.
Mechanistic
Just because a blood test shows your bad cholesterol or fat levels went down doesn't mean you're less likely to have a heart attack—only big, long-term studies with real patients can prove that.
Unlike pills you need a doctor’s prescription for, vitamins and supplements you buy over the counter aren’t tightly checked, so what’s in them can vary a lot — sometimes they have too little of the good stuff, or even bad stuff mixed in.
Statins, which are prescription drugs, can lower your 'bad' cholesterol by about half, while berberine, a natural supplement, only lowers it a little bit — so statins work much better.
Berberine, a natural compound, helps your liver remove more 'bad' cholesterol from your blood by making it keep more of the receptors that grab cholesterol—kind of like a weaker version of expensive cholesterol drugs.
Taking berberine pills may help lower your 'bad' cholesterol and fat in your blood by about 10–20%, which could be good for your heart.
Berberine, a natural compound, tells your liver to grab more bad cholesterol (LDL) out of your blood by turning on a cellular energy sensor, helping lower your cholesterol levels.
LiverTox is a living website that keeps getting better with new info about which drugs can hurt your liver, and it lets anyone suggest fixes or additions to make sure the info is right.
LiverTox is a free website that helps doctors and regular people understand which medicines might hurt the liver, using science-backed info so no one gets confused.
LiverTox is a free online tool that pulls together all the official info about drugs that can hurt your liver—like their labels, chemical makeup, and research studies—so doctors and patients can easily find trustworthy info in one place.
LiverTox is a tool that helps doctors figure out if a medicine is hurting someone’s liver, since there’s no single blood test that can say for sure—it gives them clear rules to follow.
LiverTox is a tool that helps doctors report when a medicine hurts the liver; it asks them to fill out a simple form with key info, then automatically figures out how likely the medicine caused the problem and saves all the reports to help spot dangerous drugs.