Statins useful for everyone?
May 18, 2012
AN OXFORD University study
published overnight in The Lancet
suggests that statins can benefit
even patients at very low risk of
cardiovascular incidents.
The review of 27 trials, covering a
whopping 175,000 patients in total,
has concluded that statins
significantly reduced the risk of
heart attack and stroke, and
recommends that the UK National
Health Service should consider
giving them to healthy people too.
The meta-analysis found that
reducing LDL cholesterol with a
statin reduced the risk of major
events, “largely irrespective of age,
sex, baseline LDL cholesterol or
previous vascular disease, and of
vascular and all-cause mortality”.
Each 1mmol/L reduction in LDL
cholesterol produced an absolute
reduction in major vascular events
of about 11 per 1000 over 5 years,
with the authors concluding that
“this benefit greatly exceeds any
known hazards of statin therapy”.
They said that current guidelines
would not typically regard low-risk
patients as suitable for statin
therapy but this “might need to be
reconsidered”.
The above article was sent to subscribers in Pharmacy Daily's issue from 18 May 12To see the full newsletter, see the embedded issue below or CLICK HERE to download Pharmacy Daily from 18 May 12
