How statin therapy can yield lifelong benefits

Stopping statin treatment early could substantially reduce lifetime protection against heart disease since a large share of the benefit occurs later in life. That's the finding of a modeling study presented at ESC Congress 2022.

Statins are the most commonly used lipid-modifying drug – it is estimated that in 2018, they were taken by more than 145 million people. However, delayed treatment initiation and poor adherence are common. Exaggerated claims about side-effects of statins may also be responsible for under-use among individuals at increased risk of cardiovascular events.

There is some uncertainty about when to start and how long to persist with statin therapy to optimise the effects. This study estimated the accumulation of benefit with statins according to age at therapy initiation using a microsimulation model that was developed using data on 118,000 participants of large international statin trials from the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists' (CTT) Collaboration and 500,000 individuals in the UK Biobank population cohort.

The researchers found that a large part of QALYs gained with statin therapy accrued later in life. The higher the participants' 10-year cardiovascular risk, the larger and earlier the statin benefit accrued. Compared with lifelong statins, stopping therapy at 80 years of age erased a large share of the potential benefit, especially for people with relatively low cardiovascular risk.

Ref:

Dr. Runguo Wu et al,ESC Congress 2022.