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The Chairman
Victor Niederhoffer

12/21/04
Victor Niederhoffer: It is rare..

that one has a chance to help the President since he is much wiser than us on all matters except for hard ball squash rackets. However, he recently asked how the dangers from heart attacks vis a vis Celebrex compare to those of being struck with lightning while playing golf. He reports that there were 550,000 heart attacks in a year which, based on a population of say 100 million above the age of 50, is a normal 1 in 200 per year or 5 per 1000 which as Dan says is much higher than the 1.5 in 1000 per year found in the placebo group of the NCI study. The 5 per 1000 that the NCI study found for those taking the high doses of Celebrex is in accord with the total probability of getting a heart attack that the President reports from the American Heart Association above the placebo group was taken as the base .

And the President as usual is quite correct that the small incremental total chance of getting a heart attack that the government found of 3.5 per 1000 i.e. a 1/3 of a % a year, is much too low to even consider changing your life style considering the pain reduction and the side effects of the other alternatives even if the government statistics weren't completely random. The government study shows only one thing if you didn't know it was faulty. The way to stay healthy is to enter into a government study at the NCI, where you kindly don't know if you're going to get a placebo or not, and hope you got the placebo as that would reduce your heart attack risk by half.

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