Iconocast Logo

Welcome To Iconocast

How to add a URL link from your web site to the Iconocast web sites

Virtual tour of Southern California

 

Recent News and Articles on the Keywords: statin + users + dropping  Related to the article below (Last Update: 8/4/2008)

Record rise in GP generic prescribing
Pulse, UK -
This compared with a 4.6% drop in the cost of statins and other lipid lowering drugs last year. Dr Brian Dunn, GPC prescribing spokesperson, said the report ...
There are statin alternatives -- but check with a doctor first
Los Angeles Times, CA - Jul 11, 2008
At the end of the 12-week trial, the group on the alternative regimen had a drop in cholesterol of about 40%, exactly the same as the drop seen by the group ...
Patients Don't Hesitate To Say No
Hartford Courant, United States - Jul 17, 2008
Research suggests that if there were a million Sallies in a group taking a statin drug, the number of heart attacks or strokes would drop by maybe 40 ...

The Money Times
Key Vytorin Results Expected
Forbes, NY - Jul 21, 2008
Vytorin is a combination pill of Zocor, a now generic statin made by Merck that has been shown to prevent heart attacks and strokes and save lives, ...
Schering-Plough Net Down 19% Amid Organon Purchase Costs CNNMoney.com
Merck, Schering Vytorin Cancer Scare May Sink Sales Further Bloomberg
Vytorin doesn't prevent deadly hardening of heart valve WZZM
Forbes - CNNMoney.com
all 924 news articles »  SGP - MRK - OTC:SHRGY
Red yeast rice, fish oil fight high cholesterol
Reuters India, India - Jul 17, 2008
By Anne Harding NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A regimen of supplements and lifestyle coaching is just as effective as statin medication for reducing levels of ...

WELT ONLINE
Kids' cholesterol levels stir debate
phillyBurbs.com, PA - Jul 8, 2008
The few young patients, part of the CHOP study, who've taken statins for about five years have seen their cholesterol levels drop to normal. ...
CBS
Recommendation to use statins in young children stirs jaw-dropping ... Sarasota Herald-Tribune
all 757 news articles »
Diet better than statins in kids' cholesterol control
NutraIngredients.com, France - Jul 15, 2008
... changes may reduce cholesterol levels by the same amount as a daily statin pill - a whopping 42.4 per cent drop in LDL-cholesterol levels was reported. ...
Fish oil, red yeast better than statins
Food Consumer, IL - Jul 8, 2008
Those who were treated with fish oil and red yeast experienced a significant drop in LDL (low density lipoprotein) cholesterol or the bad cholesterol, ...
Supplements, lifestyle coaching help lower bad cholesterol
SmartBrief, DC - Jul 25, 2008
The researchers also said the supplements and coaching approach was more effective than the statins in helping patients lose weight. ...
Some Kids Need Drugs to Lower Cholesterol
RedOrbit, TX - Jul 22, 2008
In 2002, lovastatin became the first statin for use in children. No one is saying every child with high cholesterol needs to be on medications, ...
Source: Google News

Statin therapy is associated with reduced mortality across all age groups of individuals with … -
CA Allen Maycock, JB Muhlestein, BD Horne, JF … - Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 2002 - Am Coll Cardio Found
... individual reached 65 years of age, there was an abrupt drop-off in ... new window],
Figure 2 Univariate Kaplan-Meier survival curves for statin users and nonusers ...

Predictors of Long-term Persistence on Statins in a Subsidized Clinical Population -
VS Catalan, J LeLorier - Value in Health, 2000 - Blackwell Synergy
... Figure 2 shows the survival curve depicting persistence on statin treatment among
the entire cohort of new users. A steep drop (of 20%) in the number of ...

Statins and Prostate Cancer Risk: A Case-Control Study -
J Shannon, S Tewoderos, M Garzotto, TM Beer, R … - American Journal of Epidemiology, 2005 - Oxford Univ Press
... We repeated our analyses, dropping these five cases ... The risk of cancer in users of
statins ... CoA reductase inhibitors and the malignant cell: the statin family of ...

Value-Based Insurance Design -
ME Chernew, AB Rosen, AM Fendrick - Health Affairs, 2007 - Health Affairs
... Dropping coverage completely could save money, at least in the short run, yet ... the
impact of financing lower copays for high-benefit statin users by increasing ...

Increasing Levels of Restriction in Pharmacoepidemiologic Database Studies of Elderly and Comparison … -
S Schneeweiss, AR Patrick, T St?rmer, MA … - Medical Care, 2007 - lww-medicalcare.com
... 3-Incident Statin and Glaucoma Medication Users, Trimmed for ... to predict exposure,
in this case statin initiation, as ... Patients dropping out of RCTs for reasons ...

[PDF] Misleading Recent Papers On Statin Drugs in Peer-Reviewed Medical Journals -
JM Kauffman - Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, 2007 - jpands.org
... had died by age 94 (Figure 2). If statins really were ... However, the post-treatment
mean ofTC in users was 178 mg ... dL, far less than the 20?30% drops observed in ...

Statins Linked with Lower PSA Levels, Decreased Prostate Cancer Incidence & Morality.
H Lindsey - Oncology Times, 2007 - oncology-times.com
... Among the 48 men with an LDL drop of more than 100 mg/dL, median ... Reviewing PSA levels
among statin users screened in the Finnish Prostate Cancer Screening Trial ...

[CITATION] OVERDOSE!
SM BY, D DOSES - American Heart Journal, 2002
-

[PDF] What You MUST Know About Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs!
S Ellison - mymassagecorner.com
... association between low levels (or dropping lev- ... of them and taking a statin drug,
you are a ... This is akin to users of the previ- ously removed Vioxx. ...

What are SNPs and haplotypes and how will they help us manage the prevention of adult cancer? -
JL Velasquez, SM Lipkin - Current Colorectal Cancer Reports, 2006 - Springer
... drop in the rectal adenoma rate, and an approximately 25% drop in patients ... from the
Netherlands, they iden- tified more than 3000 statin users from pharmacy ...

Source: Google Scholar
 
 

Statin Users Risk Heart Attacks By Dropping Treatment Or Taking Low Doses

Article Date: 12 Dec 2006 - 4:00am (PST)
Thousands of statin users worldwide are suffering preventable heart attacks, simply because they are not complying with their treatment or are taking too low a dose, according to new research published on-line in European Heart Journal[1].

These life-saving drugs, used to lower cholesterol levels in people at risk of coronary heart disease (CHD), can only be optimally effective if patients use them properly - and many are not.

That is the conclusion by the research team, who followed the prescription records of nearly 60,000 patients in the Netherlands for up to 14 years.

Dr Fernie Penning-van Beest and colleagues from the PHARMO Institute[2], the Utrecht Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Academic Hospital in Amsterdam, analysed 548,084 prescriptions of statin treatment issued over the first two years of treatment[3] in 59,094 new users in the period January 1991-December 2004, and followed the patients until their first hospital admission for heart attack, death, or the end of the study in December 2004.

Article continues below and (thank you)
 
The aim was to see how effective robust statin treatment was for primary and secondary CHD in the 'real world' - as opposed to in clinical trials. Their results enabled them to calculate the absolute number of avoidable heart attacks that occurred because patients had stopped taking their drugs or were not taking them consistently. They were also able to compare the preventive effects of different doses and types of statins.

Patients were divided into two groups - those at high risk of heart attack and those at intermediate or low risk, with over a fifth of patients (12,762) considered high risk.

They found more than half of all patients (31,557) stopped taking statins within two years and only just over a third (20,883) were persistent users on a high or intermediate dose.

Among persistent users, hospital admission for heart attacks fell by nearly a third (30%) compared to non-persistent users, in both primary and secondary prevention groups. In the primary prevention group, admission was down from 0.52 per 100 patient years among non-persistent users to 0.42 per 100 patient years in persistent users. In the secondary prevention group it was down from 0.86 to 0.62.

Among patients using the high or intermediate doses the risk reduction was as high as 40%, while a low dose reduced the risk by only 20%.

The researchers calculated that, every year, around 300 to 400 statin users in the Netherlands have an avoidable heart attack because of sub-optimal doses or discontinuing treatment. They believe the results are likely to be typical of Europe as a whole and of the USA, which means 7,000 to 9,000 Europeans and 5,000 to 7,000 Americans a year are suffering unnecessary heart attacks.

"What this clearly tells us," said lead researcher Dr Penning-van Beest, a research associate at the PHARMO Institute, "is that our observational study supports robust cholesterol lowering, as recommended on the basis of clinical trials. But, drugs are only really effective if they are used properly and persistently. Unfortunately, statins are not being used optimally, so thousands of people are having unnecessary heart attacks. Getting users to stay on statins and to use them persistently saves lives, and doctors must get over to patients the message that complying with treatment is essential."

Different types of statins are used in different doses, so the researchers dealt with these differences by grading the five statins they assessed for equipotency (the dose of one type of statin needed to achieve the same effect as another type).

They found that as well as the largest reduction in heart attacks needing hospital admission being among patients consistently taking the drugs over the whole two-year period at persistently high or intermediate equipotent doses, these patients were also relatively more likely to be using second generation statins i.e. atorvastatin or rosuvastatin, rather than the first generation types, pravastatin, fulvastatin or simvastatin. Higher doses of first generation statins were being prescribed, but increasing the dose of these older statins is limited by the maximum safe dose.

Co-author Dr Ron Herings, scientific director of the PHARMO Institute and associate professor of pharmacoepidemiology at Utrecht University, said: "It is preferable to achieve a high equipotent dose by using the new, highly potent statins. But, the new statins have considerable economic impact on pharmaceutical budgets and the opposite trend is being encouraged in the Netherlands and Germany, where reimbursement measures promote the use of relatively inexpensive generic older types."

He said: "This is fine, as long as guidelines for higher doses of these older statins are implemented, and bearing in mind that there may be limitations to giving the highest doses. But, restricting the use of older generic statins to standard low doses will make the problems worse.

"Ideally, to improve the population effectiveness of statin treatment, persistent drug use and the use of new, potent statins, should be encouraged." he concluded.

###

The research was funded by an unrestricted grant from Nefarma - the Dutch association of pharmaceutical industries. But, the study was designed, conducted and analysed entirely independently of the funders.

[1] Adherence to evidence-based statin guidelines reduces the risk of hospitalizations for acute myocardial infarction by 40%: a cohort study. European Heart Journal. doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehl391.

[2] PHARMO Institute: an independent scientific research organisation dedicated to studying drug use and outcomes in daily practice.

[3] The reduction of serum cholesterol levels is associated with a considerably lower risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) among high-risk patients and individuals without cardiovascular risk factors. The benefits of reducing cholesterol levels are obtained early, the major part after two years of treatment and the full benefit only after five years.

The European Heart Journal is an official journal of the European Society of Cardiology. Please acknowledge the journal as a source in any articles.

Contact: Margaret Willson
European Society of Cardiology
 
 
 
Google
Web www.iconocast.com
 
 
 

 

Continue News With: News6 ; News7 ; News8 ; News9 ; News9A


ADVERTISEMENT

Iconocast is about learning and teaching without borders; we offer eMarketing, Internet Advertising, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Online Branding, and eMarketing News Services. Home

 
 © 2002-2006

Keywords::

Contact Iconocast

Home Page