A large California-based study has shown that patients with heart failure who start taking statins, compared with those who don't, will live longer and have a lower hospitalization risk regardless of cholesterol levels, presence or absence of coronary disease, and other CV drug therapies, “Heartwire” reported this week.
Lead author Dr. Alan S Go (Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, Oakland) said that risk reductions in the analysis of more than 24 000 patients with no prior statin exposure are more modest than those in earlier studies of statins in HF. His study focused on a broad population that included a large proportion with mild to moderate heart failure, a departure from earlier studies whose subjects often had advanced disease. His group’s report appears in the Nov. 1 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
