LONDON: A type of drug designed to lower cholesterol levels could help protect hundreds of millions of people worldwide from suffering a heart attack or stroke, scientists said on Friday.
Results of a landmark study show that statin drugs are effective in a much wider range of people, including the elderly and women, than previously thought.
The drugs, usually prescribed for people who have heart disease or raised cholesterol levels, also reduce the risk of disease in high-risk people with normal or low cholesterol levels, diabetics, patients with narrowing of the arteries in the legs and previous stroke sufferers.
“It completely changes how we approach these high-risk individuals because lowering their cholesterol will lower their risk,” Rory Collins, the lead investigator of the Heart Protection Study, told a news conference.
The results, first reported at the American Heart Association (AHA) meeting and published in detail in The Lancet medical journal, are relevant to the treatment of some hundreds of millions of people worldwide
GUIDELINES: Cardiovascular disease is the leading killer in most industrialized nations. The results show that anyone at an increased risk of heart attack or stroke could benefit from the drugs.
If an extra 10 million high-risk people were put on statin treatment, Collins predicted 50,000 lives a year, or a thousand a week, could be saved.
“In addition, this would prevent similar numbers of people from suffering non-fatal heart attacks and strokes,” he added.
Dr Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, said the research should lead to new guidelines on prescribing statin, which could lead to a trebling of the number of people receiving the drugs.
“They are the most important and far-reaching results for the treatment and prevention of heart disease and stroke that we have seen in a generation,” he said.
New guidelines could increase sales of statin drugs by as much as $10 billion to $37 billion a year worldwide by 2005, according to Stewart Adkins, of Lehman Brothers.
In the five-year Heart Protection Study of 20,000 high-risk patients, 40 milligrams of the drug cut the risk of a heart attack or stroke by about a third in all groups, including the elderly, women and diabetics, compared to a placebo.
“As treatment continues the benefits get bigger and bigger,” Collins said, adding that the drug was well-tolerated and patients experienced few side effects.
The scientists also looked at the impact of vitamins E, C and beta carotene but found that they were ineffective in reducing the risk of heart disease.
Collins said statins can be used with aspirin and blood-pressure lowering drugs to further reduce heart disease and stroke risk.
Pfizer Inc’s Lipitor and Merck’s Zocor are leading statins, although many other companies, including AstraZeneca are developing new ones.—Reuters
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