Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
When statins lower bad cholesterol, artery inflammation tends to go down too — the two seem to move together.
Correlational
Stronger statins seem to calm artery inflammation better than weaker ones, based on scans that show how much sugar inflamed cells are using.
Taking statins may help calm down inflammation in the walls of arteries, which can be seen on a special scan that tracks sugar use by inflamed cells.
GLP-1 drugs shrink a layer of fat that surrounds the heart — this fat is linked to heart disease, and shrinking it may help protect the heart from damage.
Descriptive
GLP-1 drugs slightly lower blood pressure — even when you don’t lose weight or improve your blood sugar — which helps protect your heart and blood vessels.
Causal
GLP-1 drugs don’t just lower blood sugar — they also make dangerous artery plaques more stable by reducing inflammation and strengthening the plaque’s outer shell, which helps prevent heart attacks and strokes.
Mechanistic
For people with type 2 diabetes, GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide and dulaglutide lower the chance of having a stroke caused by a blood clot by nearly 1 in 6 — more than any other diabetes medicine.
Even if you don’t have diabetes, if you’re overweight and have heart disease, a weekly shot of semaglutide can cut your risk of heart attack or stroke by 1 in 5 — and this benefit starts before you lose much weight.
For people with type 2 diabetes and heart disease, a weekly injection of semaglutide lowers their chance of having a heart attack, stroke, or dying from heart problems by about a quarter.
GLP-1 diabetes drugs help prevent heart attacks and strokes mainly by lowering blood sugar and helping people lose weight—not by lowering blood pressure or bad cholesterol.
GLP-1 diabetes drugs that lower blood sugar and weight the most tend to offer the biggest protection against heart attacks and strokes in people with type 2 diabetes.
For people with type 2 diabetes, lowering their blood pressure or bad cholesterol with GLP-1 drugs doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference in their risk of heart attack or stroke.
Losing just 1 kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) of body weight while taking GLP-1 diabetes drugs is linked to a 7% lower chance of having a heart attack, stroke, or dying from heart disease.
For people with type 2 diabetes, lowering their blood sugar by 1% using certain diabetes medications is linked to a 25% lower chance of having a heart attack, stroke, or dying from heart disease.
Ezetimibe works best when the liver isn’t making much cholesterol on its own and the gut is absorbing a lot from food.
Even though ezetimibe lowered cholesterol and changed a key liver enzyme in diabetic and thyroid-deficient rats, it didn’t change the liver’s cholesterol-cleaning receptors at all.
In healthy rats that naturally make a lot of cholesterol in their liver, the drug ezetimibe didn’t lower their blood cholesterol at all.
In rats without thyroid glands that ate a high-cholesterol diet, a drug called ezetimibe lowered their blood cholesterol and brought back their liver’s cholesterol-making enzyme to normal levels, but didn’t change the receptor that clears cholesterol from the blood.
When diabetic rats ate a high-cholesterol diet and were given a drug called ezetimibe, their blood cholesterol dropped dramatically, and their liver made more of a key cholesterol-making enzyme—not by making more of its instructions, but by using the existing instructions more efficiently.
Losing weight with diet and exercise doesn’t always help the heart in people with type 2 diabetes—sometimes it helps a lot, sometimes it doesn’t help at all, and sometimes it might even make things worse.
For people with type 2 diabetes, factors like age, weight, blood sugar levels, and past heart problems can tell us whether losing weight through diet and exercise will help or hurt their heart health.
For some people with type 2 diabetes who are overweight, losing weight through diet and exercise can lower their chance of having a heart attack or stroke—but for others, it might actually increase that risk.
People who join a group program focused on healthy living are more than five times as likely to quit smoking as those who just get general advice.
People who join a group program at their clinic to exercise and eat better end up being much more active over time, while those who just get general advice don’t change much.