Fig. 2.

Luria started patients with cardiovascular disease on long-acting niacin 1 g daily as 250 mg four times daily, following lipids on this dose at 3 and 6 months later [51]. Despite a fixed dose throughout follow up, lipids had not clearly reached a plateau at 6 months. This suggests a major limitation to some of the proof-of-concept studies of the novel niacin mimetics. Studies of less than 3 months and especially less than 1 month are susceptible to miss clinically-meaningful effects if they behave like niacin. This further suggests how niacin itself can fail to demonstrate clinically-meaningful effects when used as a control for such studies. The shaded area denotes the 1-month mark. Assuming linearity between initiation and 3 months, that region gives an appreciation for how a study of ultra-short duration might miss a lipid effect entirely. We imputed the SD from total cholesterol to estimate SEM for non-HDL-c