How long before your doctor reanalyzes your need for statins. But then you are at high risk for another cardiovascular event because of your previous event and your doctor will cite that for not even looking at your statin therapy. Never mind me, I know nothing about medical topics.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-genetic-linked-clinical-benefit-statin.html
New research suggests that widely used statin therapy provides the
most benefit to patients with the highest genetic risk of heart attack.
Using a relatively straightforward genetic analysis, the researchers
assessed heart attack risk independently of traditional risk factors
such as age, sex, so-called good and bad cholesterol levels, smoking
history, family history and whether the patient has diabetes.
Patients in intermediate and low-risk categories
still benefit from statin therapy, but that benefit is progressively
smaller because they're starting at lower baseline risk, according to
the investigators.
The research, from Washington University School of Medicine in St.
Louis, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital and
Harvard Medical School appears March 4 in The Lancet.
For patients at risk of heart disease, doctors routinely prescribe
statins, known for their cholesterol-lowering effect. In 2013, the
American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association
changed the guidelines for statin therapy, dramatically increasing the
number of patients recommended to take it. The move has stirred debate
over whether these drugs are overused, especially in light of increasing
health-care costs.
"There is ongoing debate over which individuals should be allocated
statin therapy to prevent a first heart attack," said co-first author
Nathan O. Stitziel, MD, a Washington University cardiologist and human
geneticist. "Some have said we should be treating more people, while
others say we need to treat fewer. As an example of precision medicine,
another approach is to identify people at high risk and preferentially
prescribe statin therapy to those individuals. Genetics appears to be
one way to identify high-risk patients."
Stitziel noted that this genetic analysis is not available to
patients right now. More research is needed to validate the findings
before such a test could be developed for clinical use.
More at link.
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