More should take cholesterol drugs - researchers
Wednesday July 1st, 2009
Supposedly healthy people should take cholesterol-lowering drugs - if they are at risk of heart disease, researchers report today.
The latest finding confirms a number of recent suggestions that the drugs, statins, should be used widely to help reduce the risk of heart disease.
Dutch researchers said people with risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes or obesity would clearly benefit from taking statins.
The conclusions come from an analyis of ten major trials involving 70,000 people, reported today by the British Medical Journal.
It showed that taking statins reduced death rates by 12 per cent in people who did not have diagnosed heart disease. It cut the risk of "major events", such as heart attacks, by 30 per cent.
The findings showed no evidence of statins causing cancer.
Researcher Dr Jaspar Brugts, a heart specialist at Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam, says it is still not possible to define exactly who would benefit most from statin therapy. He suggests men over the age of 65 with other risk factors and older women with risk factors and diabetes.
He writes: "Further work is needed to improve the identification of these people and to accurately assess their risk. But, given the favourable of long term statin treatment, it would be wrong to deny these benefits to people at increased risk for cardiovascular disease."
British Medical Journal on-line July 1 2009
Tags: Diabetes | Europe | Heart Health
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