Using Statins To Lower Cholesterol May Be More Beneficial Way To Prevent Heart Attack And Stroke

Using Statins To Lower Cholesterol May Be More Beneficial Way To Prevent Heart Attack And Stroke.
Broader use of cholesterol-lowering statins may be a cost-effective scheme to halt humanitarianism attack and stroke, US researchers suggest. In the study, published online Sept 27, 2010 in the catalogue Circulation. The researchers also found that screening for dear sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP) to identify patients who may benefit from statin group therapy is only cost-effective in certain cases.

Elevated levels of CRP indicate inflammation and suggest an increased gamble for heart attack and stroke. Currently, statin therapy is recommended for high-risk patients - those with a 20 percent or greater danger of some type of cardiovascular event within the next 10 years.

But statins may also better people with a lower risk, according to Dr Mark Hlatky, professor of health fact-finding and policy and of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, Calif, and colleagues. Hlatky's rig set out to determine the cost-effectiveness of three statin therapy approaches in patients with sane cholesterol levels and no evidence of heart disease or diabetes: following current guidelines; conducting CRP screening in patients who don't settle current statin treatment guidelines and offering statins to those with pre-eminent CRP levels; and providing statin therapy based on a patient's cardiovascular jeopardize alone, with no CRP testing.

The researchers analyzed which of the three approaches met the generally accepted cost-effectiveness dawn of no more than $50000 per quality-adjusted life-year. They found that statin therapy based on cardiovascular chance alone, without CRP testing, was the most cost-effective strategy.

Initiating statin treatment at lower endanger levels - without CRP testing - "would further improve clinical outcomes at pleasant cost, making it the optimally cost-effective strategy in our analysis," the researchers wrote in a university newsflash release. "Ideally, a marker would tell us who will benefit from drug treatment and who will not," Hlatky peaked out in the release. "If a test could give us that information, it would be very cost-effective reviews. But there's not good evidence yet that CRP, or any other test, innards that well".