As the numbers of completed outcomes based clinical trials evaluating the use of statin drugs for the management of cardiovascular risk continue to increase, it is clear that the numbers of patients that may benefit from these drugs continues to grow. The recently published studies are reviewed in this summary. The distinction is made between patients requiring either primary or secondary cardi...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the incidence of muscle toxicity in patients receiving statin therapy by examining study populations, drug exposure status and outcome definitions. DESIGN A retrospective cohort study. SETTING 16 medical facilities in Japan providing information on laboratory tests performed in and claims received by their facilities between 1 April 2004 and 31 December 2010. PARTICI...

The placebo-corrected incidence of rhabdomyolysis in a systematic review of 20 statin trials was 1.6/100,000 per year. It is likely to be higher than this in everyday clinical practice when statins are knowingly or inadvertently co-prescribed with drugs that interfere with their metabolism. We report a case of rhabdomyolysis causing muscle weakness and prolonging an episode of dialysis-dependen...

BACKGROUND Hydroxymethyl glutaryl coenzyme A reductase inhibitors, commonly called statins, are some of the most commonly prescribed medications worldwide. Evidence suggests that statin therapy has significant mortality and morbidity benefit for both primary and secondary prevention from cardiovascular disease. Nonetheless, concern has been expressed regarding the adverse effects of long term s...

BACKGROUND Statins, drugs used to treat dyslipidemia, may have anticancer properties. We have evaluated lymphoma risk associated with regular statin use in an international case-control study. METHODS This case-control study included 2,362 cases of incident B- and T-cell lymphoma from Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Spain and 2,206 hospital or population controls. Informa...

Among patients who had not achieved LDL-C goals, two-thirds had abnormal HDL-C or triglyceride levels, or both. Dr. Gitt concluded: “Many patients in Europe and Canada, the majority of whom are at high risk for cardiovascular events, do not reach their LDL-C goals in spite of statin therapy.” He said further in an interview, “There is a lot of space for improvement, either by increasing doses o...

Statin drugs are prescribed primarily for their ability to lower cholesterol, but may also exert beneficial side effects unrelated to cholesterol metabolism. Previous work has described a "statin paradox," where statin treatment decreased osteoblastic markers in valve myofibroblasts while increasing those same markers in preosteoblasts. However, valvular interstitial cells (VICs) themselves are...