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 means to retard spunk decry and stroke, US researchers suggest. In the study, published online Sept 27, 2010 in the quarterly Circulation home. The researchers also found that screening for consequential touchiness C-reactive protein (CRP) to diagnose patients who may benefit from statin therapy is only cost-effective in certain cases.

Elevated levels of CRP intimate inflammation and suggest an increased jeopardy for heart attack and stroke. Currently, statin therapy is recommended for high-risk patients - those with a 20 percent or greater danger of some group 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 salubrity research and policy and of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, Calif, and colleagues. Hlatky's side set out to regulate the cost-effectiveness of three statin remedial programme approaches in patients with normal cholesterol levels and no evidence of empathy disease or diabetes: following current guidelines; conducting CRP screening in patients who don't meeting current statin healing guidelines and offering statins to those with elevated CRP levels; and providing statin psychoanalysis based on a patient's cardiovascular chance alone, with no CRP testing.

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

Initiating statin remedying at lower risk levels - without CRP testing - "would further redeem clinical outcomes at tolerable cost, making it the optimally cost-effective strategy in our analysis," the researchers wrote in a university dispatch release. "Ideally, a marker would effect us who will benefit from drug treatment and who will not," Hlatky mucronulate out in the release. "If a test could give us that information, it would be very cost-effective jepang. But there's not all right evidence yet that CRP, or any other test, works that well".