Cholesterol pills may become as ubiquitous as a daily dose of aspirin for middle-aged men and women who have normal levels of artery-clogging fat after a study found the medicine cut their risks of heart attacks, strokes and death by almost half.
Over five years, using AstraZeneca's drug Crestor in people with normal cholesterol could prevent 250,000 heart complications in the US, the researchers said.
The findings, reported yesterday at the American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans, ignited a debate among doctors over which drugs to use, the safety of life-long therapy in seemingly healthy people, and whether current guidelines for cholesterol pills are outdated.
“Should we put them in the drinking water?” asked Lori Mosca, professor of medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and
Surgeons, humorously echoing a question heard throughout the meeting yesterday.
“Are we going to use this like aspirin therapy? This finding is clearly expanding the universe of who should receive cholesterol pills, but we need to carefully
evaluate at what point it becomes cost effective to treat the majority of people,” she said.
The trial, dubbed Jupitor, only included those with high levels of C-reactive protein, or CRP, a compound linked with inflammation in the body. It tested only Crestor.
Steven Scala, an analyst at Cowen & Company in Boston, said in an October 29th note that Crestor sales, an estimated $3.45 billion in 2008, may almost double on the CRP indication.
Seeking Marketing Approval AstraZeneca said it plans to submit the findings to US regulators in the first half of 2009, seeking approval to expand use of the drug to people with high levels of CRP.
Crestor belongs to a family of drugs known as statins that include Pfizer's top-selling Lipitor and cheap generic copies of Merck's Zocor.
Some doctors interviewed at the meeting said they wouldn't limit their prescribing to Crestor, because they believed the benefits may be similar with other statins.
Bloomberg