A new study suggests treating more adults with cholesterol-lowering statins could be a cost-effective way to save lives.
The study suggests that if current recommended treatment guidelines for statins are expanded and the number of people taking the drugs is boosted, an additional 161,560 cardiovascular-related events could be avoided, Harvard School of Public Health reported.
"The new cholesterol treatment guidelines have been controversial, so our goal for this study was to use the best available evidence to quantify the tradeoffs in health benefits, risks, and costs of expanding statin treatment. We found that the new guidelines represent good value for money spent on healthcare, and that more lenient treatment thresholds might be justifiable on cost-effectiveness grounds even accounting for side-effects such as diabetes and myalgia," said Ankur Pandya, assistant professor of health decision science at Harvard Chan School and lead author of the study.
The percentage of Americans taking statins is already on the rise, and in 2012 26 percent of all U.S. adults over the ages of 40 were taking the drugs. In November 2013, the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) released new recommendations that anybody with a 7.5 percent or greater risk of heart attack or stroke over the period of a decade with no existing cardiovascular problems should be prescribed statins.
Following these new guidelines, a team of researchers preformed a cost-effectiveness analysis of the ACC-AHA guidelines. They determined the 10-year cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk threshold was acceptable in terms of cost-effectiveness.
The new recommendations were met with some criticism, and the critics worried heart risks had been overestimated and more adults would be overtreated and subjected to negative side effects related to the drugs. Proponents of expanded use have urged it will greatly reduce heart attack and stroke incidents in the U.S.
The findings were reported in a recent edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
