Are statins promising treatment for ovarian cancer? Study throws light

Delhi: The use of lipophilic statins among ovarian cancer patients may lead to a 40% reduction in cancer-specific mortality, according to a recent study. The study was presented at the second American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) virtual meeting. 

Due to promising preclinical and epidemiologic data, modest toxicity, low cost, and broad access, repurposing statins for ovarian cancer treatment is appealing. To inform the design of a randomized clinical trial, Kala Visvanathan, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, MD, and colleagues conducted a large observational study to identify subgroups of ovarian cancer (OC) patients that could benefit from statin treatment.

The researchers used data from the Finnish national cancer registry that was linked to prescription claims on 10,062 women with ovarian cancer. Then the researchers analyzed the association between pre- and post-diagnostic statin use and mortality. They used time updated marginal structural Cox regression models with inverse probability of treatment weights to calculate hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) between users and never users to address potential confounding due to indication for statin initiation.