Drug Can Prevent Heart Attacks And Strokes | Indonesia News

A type of cholesterol lowering drug can prevent heart attacks and strokes in many more people than current guidelines recommend, research suggests.
They must be considered for a wider range of patients after the study of heart disease or diabetes victims found they would save the NHS money.
Statins are mainly used to minimise the risk of cardiovascular disease in people with high cholesterol.

They are already given to around 2.5m people in the UK, but doctors tend just to recommend them to people with high cholesterol.
Large trials have shown lowering blood cholesterol levels with statins greatly reduces major vascular events, such as heart attacks and strokes, in people at high risk.

And research published in 2005 from the largest of those, called The Heart Protection Study, showed when cheaper generic versions are used, several years of statin treatment is cost effective for a wide range of people with vascular disease or diabetes.
The Heart Protection Study involved 20,536 men and women aged between 40 and 80 with heart disease or diabetes. They were randomly allocated to receive either 40 mg simvastatin daily or a dummy drug for an average of five years.

Using data from the study, the researchers have now estimated the lifetime cost effectiveness of 40 mg simvastatin daily for people in an even wider range of age and underlying vascular risk categories.
They found treatment with generic simvastatin would be cost saving for most of the age and risk categories included in the heart protection study.
In other words, the reduced costs of hospital admissions as a result of fewer vascular events outweighed the increased costs of statin treatment in almost all of the categories studied.

In fact, they found that statin treatment was cost effective in people as young as 35 and as old as 85 with an annual risk of a major vascular event as low as 1%.
These new analyses indicate that, at current generic prices, lifelong treatment with simvastatin is cost saving or very cost effective for many more people than previously thought, say the authors.
Hence, statin therapy should be considered routinely for people across a wider age range and at lower risk of vascular disease than is currently the case.

Dr Borislava Mihaylova, of the University of Oxford, said: In the UK, statins are recommended for people with an estimate ten year risk of a cardiovascular event of 20% or more.
But a large meta-analysis has shown that similar relative reductions in risk are produced by lowering low density lipoprotein cholesterol with statins by the same absolute amount in higher and lower risk populations.
Added Dr Mihaylova: At current UK prices for generic simvastatin, 40 mg simvastatin daily is likely to be cost saving, or would cost less than £2500 per life year gained, for people with an annual risk of major vascular events of 1% or more, independently of their age at the start of treatment.

Hence, statin therapy should be considered routinely for people across a wider age range and at lower risk of vascular disease than is currently the case.