Steady cholesterol-pill use found to cut death risk
Continuous treatment with cholesterol pills, such as Pfizer Inc.'s Lipitor, reduced the risk of death in patients with high cholesterol 45 percent over four to five years, a study found.
People who hadn't yet been diagnosed with heart disease and those who had already been diagnosed both showed the reduction in death if they took the drugs 90 percent of the time, when compared with patients who took the drugs less than 10 percent of the time, according to the study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The benefits of the cholesterol pills, from the group known as statins, were greater than clinical trials had previously suggested, the authors wrote. Heart disease, the leading killer in the U.S., affects some 15 million people, according to the American Heart Association. The risk grows with age, high cholesterol, physical inactivity and diabetes.
"This goes a long way toward addressing whether statins are good for prevention," said Dr. Robert Bonow, chief of cardiology at Northwestern University in Chicago and a former president of the heart association. He wasn't involved in the study. "Not only do they prevent heart attacks and strokes - they boost survival."
The study was done by Varda Shalev and others at Tel Aviv University in Israel, using data from 229,918 Israelis who were enrolled in a health maintenance organization and began using statins between 1998 to 2006. About 136,100 of those were taking a statin to prevent heart disease; the rest were prescribed the drugs in order to control the heart disease they had.
The reduction in death risks was strongest in people who had the highest levels of so-called "bad" cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein or LDL, of 190 mg/dL or more. That group made up 18.2 percent of the study participants. The risk of death was also less in those with high levels of LDL between 160 and 189, which included 32 percent of the study group. Overall, the death risk was 45 percent lower in all groups combined who had LDL ranging from less than 130 to 190 or more.
Because the pool of data was so large, the authors didn't determine whether the deaths were from cardiovascular causes. Another limitation of the trial was that the data were retrospective, Bonow said.
The finding follows an earlier study, presented at the American Heart Association's scientific meeting in New Orleans, that found AstraZeneca Plc.'s Crestor slashed the risk of heart attack, stroke and death 47 percent in those with normal or low cholesterol. The study, called Jupiter, suggested an additional 6 million men and women over the age of 60 should take the drugs.
"The magnitude of difference was almost the same as reported in Jupiter," Bonow said. "There's growing evidence that statin drugs are indeed beneficial in primary prevention."