Study shows persistent benefits of statin drug

By Gene Emery

BOSTON (Reuters) - The heart benefits of taking statin drugs may last for years, even after the drugs are stopped, researchers reported on Wednesday.

Men who took pravastatin for five years had a lower risk of death or heart attack even 10 years after they stopped taking the drug, Ian Ford of the University of Glasgow in Scotland and colleagues found.

In their study of 6,595 middle-aged men, the risk of heart attack or death from any type of heart disease was 11.8 percent for the pravastatin recipients, compared with 15.5 percent for volunteers who took a placebo for the first five years of the test.

"Statin treatment for an average of five years provided an ongoing reduction in the risk of coronary events for an additional period of up to 10 years," they wrote in their report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The biggest benefit -- a 40 percent reduction in the chance of heart attack or heart disease death -- came while taking the drug, but the reduction was still 18 percent in the years after the initial study was completed.

The drug, now available in generic form but originally marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb as Pravachol, seems to produce no serious long-term health problems.

"There was no evidence of an overall increase in the risk of death from noncardiovascular causes or cancer, or in the incidence of cancer," the researchers wrote.

The results are based on an ongoing assessment of volunteers in the West of Scotland Coronary Prevention Study, which was sponsored by the drug company. All of the volunteers had high cholesterol levels but had never had a heart attack.

After the first five years, the patients, 44 percent of whom were smokers, were sent back to their regular doctor.

Because, in the mid-1990s, many physicians were not using cholesterol-lowering drugs to prevent an initial heart attack, most volunteers who had been taking the statins did not continue with them.