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Early Use of Statins Increases Heart Attack Survival

A popular medication given immediately after a heart attack significantly reduces the risk of complications and death, according to a recent study.

Previous studies have shown that giving top-selling statin treatments like Liptor and Zocor to heart attack survivors after leaving the hospital improved long-term survival rates. This study, however, is the first to imply that the sooner these statin drugs are given, the better.

"There is a lower mortality with earlier statin therapy," said study author Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, professor of cardiology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In the study, which was published in the American Journal of Cardiology, researchers reviewed more than 170,000 patients admitted to U.S. hospitals for heart attack. Overall, those who weren’t taking statins previously had their long-term risk of death cut by 58 percent.

Additionally, patients already taking statins prior to admission who were given a statin within 24 hours of admission were found to have a 54 percent lower risk of dying during their hospital stay than those who did not.

Most strikingly, the researchers say, is that only 5 percent of those quickly given a statin died in the hospital, compared to a 16 percent death rate among patients who discontinued the drug or never received the drug at all.

How Statins Help
More than 12 million Americans currently take statins, making them the most prescribed drug in America. The drugs help the heart by blocking an enzyme in the liver that makes cholesterol. They thereby significantly lower a patient’s risk of heart attack.

But Fonarow explains that statins may play an even more immediate role, explaining the benefit that immediate statin use has for even those who took the drug previously. In animal studies, the drugs have been shown to increase the amount of nitric oxide in the body, a chemical which serves to protect the heart. Theoretically, the sooner a statin is given to a patient after a heart attack, the less damage that occurs.

Current guidelines only call for statins to be prescribed before a heart-attack patient is discharged from the hospital, but Fonarow hopes that more medical centers will begin to heed the results of this study and give them to patients early in the course of treatment.

"Given that patients should be given statins prior to discharge, they are readily available [in the hospital]," he said. "It makes sense that more doctors would adopt this idea."