- Researchers report that only 35% of adults who are eligible to take statins for prevention of cardiovascular disease are actually using them.
- They said that misinformation about statins’ side effects could be a factor.
- They add that doctors also need more assistance in identifying people who could benefit from statin therapy.
Statin drugs are a front-line preventive therapy for adults with cardiovascular diseases, but many people who could benefit aren’t using them, a new study suggests.
Statin use has increased over time among adults ages 20 and older, according to the research report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that looked at trends in statin use between 1999 and 2018.
However, researchers reported that general trend largely plateaued in the past five years of the study period (between 2013 and 2018), with only a little more than one in three eligible adults receiving the drugs.
As a class of drugs, statins help lower blood cholesterol, lessening the risk of heart attack and stroke. It’s recommended for people with levels of 190 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl) or higher of LDL cholesterol, also known as “bad” cholesterol. It’s also recommended for adults ages 40 to 75 with LDL of 70 mg/dl or higher but who also have diabetes or are at high risk of heart attack or stroke.
It’s also recommended to prescribe statins to people following a heart attack or stroke or if they have peripheral arterial disease.
“Statins are medications that reduce the amount of cholesterol your body makes in the liver. In doing so, our liver responds by taking up cholesterol particles in the blood more readily, resulting in less cholesterol in the blood available to damage arteries and cause a heart attack or stroke,” said Dr. Yu-Ming Ni, a cardiologist and lipidologist at MemorialCare Heart and Vascular Institute at Orange Coast Medical Center in California who was not involved in the study.
“There is also some data that statins reduce inflammation and…
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