Stopping Statins After Heart Attack Increases Risk Of Death

�Patients discontinuing statin medication following an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) increase their risk of dying over the future year, say researchers at McGill University and the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC). Their study was published in a recent issue of the European Heart Journal.



Using data on British patients who survived an AMI and were still alive three months later, Dr. Stella Daskalopoulou and colleagues found that those world Health Organization discontinued their statin medicament were 88% 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 Dr. Daskalopoulou, of 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 16% less likely to die over the next year than those world Health Organization never secondhand them. So even if it appears that the statins failed to keep your AMI, it is beneficial to continue taking them and potentially quite harmful to stop."



The declamatory, population-based cohort study was conducted victimization UK data to take up advantage of the medical records kept in the General Practice Research Database (GPRD), which collects information on the health of more than three 1000000 patients across the UK.



"In the general population the statin discontinuation rate inside the start year of prescription is 30 per centum. That's very high," Dr. Daskalopoulou continued. "Because statins are hinderance drugs, patients may non feel the immediate welfare of taking them and sometimes arrest. However, it looks like this mightiness be quite a dangerous practice after an AMI."



The harmful effects of lipid-lowering medicine discontinuation may be the result of many different mechanisms, including individual affected role characteristics, the researchers explained. "Regardless of the mechanism or explanation, physicians should be careful when assessing each patient's medication necessarily," Dr. Daskalopoulou said. "Patients also need to adopt their medications exactly as prescribed afterward an AMI. Statins in particular should only be withdrawn after an AMI under close clinical supervision."





Source: Mark Shainblum

McGill University



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