That Happened!

New York - A new study provides evidence that a cholesterol drug used widely to mediate heart disease can actually help prevent the disease in healthy patients.

Researchers in Boston tested 18,000 people for signs of cardiovascular disease using a highly sensitive blood test. The patients were given a preventive dose of the cholesterol drug statin, normally used to treat cardiovascular problems. The drug cut the rate of strokes and heart attacks by 50 percent. The results indicate a landmark shift in the way heart disease is treated.

“The potential public health benefits are huge,” said Paul M. Ridker of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who presented the findings today at a meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans. “It really changes the way we have to think about prevention of heart attack and stroke.”

Last year close to 1 million people died from heart disease, making it the number one cause of death in the U.S. About half of these patients had no warning signs, such as high cholesterol or chest pains. The Brigham study remedies this conundrum by proving that preventive medicine can cut the risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute will revise its guidelines on heart disease next year, and will take the results into consideration. This could lead to a major reduction in heart disease, along with increased use of the Brigham test and statin cholesterol drugs.

“These are findings that are really going to impact the practice of cardiology in the country,” said Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which was not involved in the research. “It’s at a minimum an extremely important study and has the potential to be a landmark study.”

However, some researchers caution preventive prescriptions should not be given freely, and that physicians should decide who would best benefit from the drug. With the widely representative sample of the study, however, many believe that statins used as preventive drugs could substantially benefit the population and eventually save the U.S. billions of dollars in treatment costs.