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Statins may help heart-failure patients
WASHINGTON, Jul 22, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Patients with diastolic heart failure appear to fare much better when they take cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, researchers reported Friday.
The study, in the journal Circulation, is the first to identify any treatment that reduces mortality in such patients, whose hearts are unable to relax fully and fill with blood. The condition accounts for about 40 percent of heart-failure cases.
Cardiologists at Wake Forest University's Baptist Medical Center discovered the statin benefit as they followed 137 patients over a three-year period.
"Some patients in the group had been diagnosed with high cholesterol and placed on statin therapy by their doctors," said Dr. William C. Little, head of the hospital's cardiac section. "Others in the group whose cholesterol levels were not as high in general, were not placed on statins, but when we followed the patients, we found that those who had received statins did dramatically better."
Heart-failure patients who were on statins had a 22 percent lower death rate than those who were not, the researchers found.
The exact reasons for the difference are unclear, but the results could be due to the beneficial effect of statins on coronary artery disease, which is quite common, though sometimes undiagnosed, in the elderly. Statins also might improve diabetes and kidney function in heart-failure patients with those conditions, Little said.
"Because the patients were not randomized to which therapy they received, this is not a definitive study," he added. "However, it certainly suggests that it's worth looking into using statins to treat patients with diastolic heart failure."
Once hospitalized, diastolic heart-failure patients have a 50 percent chance of being re-hospitalized in the next six month, studies show. The mortality rate is 5 percent to 8 percent per year, and aggregate cost of care in the United States is about $3.5 billion annually.
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Dan Olmsted is UPI's Health Editor. E-mail: sciencemail@upi.com