Three brands of statin drugs; there are others

ABC World News (1/30, story 8, 2:15, Sawyer) reported that “for the first time a study proves statins are as effective in preventing heart attacks in women as well as men.”   (Editor’s note: statins are widely used drugs to lower cholesterol and prevent heart problems—PG)

On its website, ABC News (1/31) reports that investigators “reviewed 18 randomized controlled trials that included more than 140,000 patients.”

HealthDay (1/31, Reinberg) reports that the research, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, indicated that “for both males and females,” statins “lowered the risk of a heart attack by about 20 percent.” In the past, some believed “that statins…benefited women less than men.”

Blogfinger Medical Commentary:  By Paul Goldfinger, MD, FACC

This is what they are saying in this report:  “For the first time a study proves statins are as effective in preventing heart attacks in women as well as men.”  Well that is not exactly true, because there is no original new research involved in this pronouncement. Instead, the researchers took 18 pre-existing trials on this subject and performed sophisticated statistical analysis. In other words, they threw all the data into an academic pot, stirred them up, fed them into a computer and came out with this.

In our book “Prevention Does Work:  A Guide to a Health Heart  2011, 4th edition,” there is this sentence:  “In a review of 5 major trials, benefits [with statins] were seen for women and for the elderly, in addition to the well documented benefits in men.  (JAMA. 12/22/99.)” As you can see, the study cited is from 1999. We also mention other trials that included women, so it’s not like women were totally ignored in past statin trials.  What is true is that most of the large trials consisted mostly of men, because research trials become difficult to interpret without sharply defined study groups.  Then, what usually happens, is that the next generation of trials begins to pull back the covers to check out subgroups like women, elderly, children, etc.  It takes many trials, many study subjects, many years and many dollars to sort out the issues that are revealed when a simple truth is discovered—ie statin drugs save lives.

In our practice, we never excluded women from receiving statins. For years, there has been enough evidence for most cardiologists to offer the same treatment to women as to men. If you wait for the final verdict from professors, you would deny all sorts of excellent treatments to patients.

Doctors always have used approved drugs for purposes that hadn’t yet been convincingly proven  (such as prescribing statins for women)  but were reasonable to do.  Now the numbers have been crunched and the fact is “proven.”  But I am sure that most informed docs have been doing the right thing for years in terms of prescribing statins to women.  If there are some physicians out there who have denied the treatment to women because of doubts about the data, well they had better change their tune now.