Impact of statin use on heart failure mortality
International Journal of Cardiology, 03/22/2011
Clinical Article
Thambidorai SK et al. - Veterans who were not exposed to statin therapy at any time during the study period were 1.56 times more likely to suffer all-cause mortality.
Methods- Authors studied 10,510 consecutive patients from the Veterans Affairs health system with a diagnosis of heart failure from January 2002 through December 2006.
- Mean follow-up was 2.66years.
- Statin use and duration of therapy were identified.
- Veterans were classified into four groups based on duration of statin use during the study period (none, 1-25%, 26-75% and >75% use of statins).
- Logistic regression was performed to identify the association between incident statin use and all-cause mortality following a diagnosis of heart failure.
- The Kaplan-Meier method was employed to assess for differences in survival time between the four statin use classifications.
- Statin use was significantly associated with decreased all-cause mortality following a diagnosis of heart failure after controlling for age, gender, concurrent medications and comorbid diagnoses [chi32 (N=10,510)=1077.82, p<0.001].
- The benefit was seen within a relatively short duration (within 1year) after starting statins, and in patients with <25% use of statins, there was no mortality benefit.
