Study shows who benefits most from statins

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.

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