Giving up statins doubles heart attack patients' death risk
Washington, Aug 28 : Heart patients who stop taking statins after suffering a heart
attack are increasing their risk of dying over the next year, suggests a new study.
Researchers at McGill University and the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) used
the data on British patients who survived an acute myocardial infarction and were still
alive three months.
They found that those who discontinued their statin medication were 88pct more likely
to die during the following year compared to those who had never been on the
medication.
"Statins were found to be beneficial drugs," said lead researcher Stella Daskalopoulou,
McGill's Faculty of Medicine and the Department of Medicine and the Division of Clinical
Epidemiology at the MUHC.
"Patients who used statins before an AMI and continued to take them after were 16pct
less likely to die over the next year than those who never used them.
"So even if it appears that the statins failed to prevent your AMI, it is beneficial to
continue taking them and potentially quite harmful to stop," she added.
Daskalopoulou said that in the general population the statin discontinuation rate
within the first year of prescription is 30 percent.
"That's very high because statins are preventative drugs, patients may not feel the
immediate benefit of taking them and sometimes stop. However, it looks like this might be
quite a dangerous practice after an AMI," she said.
The researchers suggest that harmful effects of statin discontinuation may be the
result of many different mechanisms, including individual patient characteristics.
--ANI
