Statin Use and Risk of Diabetes Mellitus in Postmenopausal Women in the Women's Health Initiative Full Text
JAMA Internal Medicine, 01/24/2012
Clinical Article
Culver AL et al. - Statin medication use in postmenopausal women is associated with an increased risk for diabetes mellitus (DM). This may be a medication class effect. Further study by statin type and dose may reveal varying risk levels for new-onset DM in this population.
Methods- The WHI recruited 161 808 postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 years at 40 clinical centers across the United States from 1993 to 1998 with ongoing follow-up.
- The current analysis includes data through 2005.
- Statin use was captured at enrollment and year 3.
- Incident DM status was determined annually from enrollment.
- Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate the risk of DM by statin use, with adjustments for propensity score and other potential confounding factors.
- Subgroup analyses by race/ethnicity, obesity status, and age group were conducted to uncover effect modification.
- This investigation included 153 840 women without DM and no missing data at baseline.
- At baseline, 7.04% reported taking statin medication.
- There were 10 242 incident cases of self-reported DM over 1 004 466 person-years of follow-up.
- Statin use at baseline was associated with an increased risk of DM (hazard ratio [HR], 1.71; 95% CI, 1.61-1.83).
- This association remained after adjusting for other potential confounders (multivariate-adjusted HR, 1.48; 95% CI, 1.38-1.59) and was observed for all types of statin medications.
- Subset analyses evaluating the association of self-reported DM with longitudinal measures of statin use in 125 575 women confirmed these findings.
