Those wildly popular statins, which are taken by millions of Americans, don't raise the risk of cancer, after all, according to a new report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Last year, the same authors from Tufts University School of Medicine published a paper that found cancer rates rose in tandem with lower cholesterol levels in patients taking statins.
The new report, however, shows nearly an identical relationship of more malignancies in people with lower cholesterol, even when they weren't taking the meds. The findings appear to clear statins from responsibility for the cancers, Richard Karas, director of preventive cardiology at Tufts Medical Center and the senior author of the paper, tells Bloomberg News .
"We found that there is indeed an association, that the lower the LDL cholesterol, the higher the risk of cancer," Karas tells Heartwire . "Despite the LDL-lowering capacity of statins, however, the data are quite reassuring that statins don't increase the risk of cancer."
The study analyzed the findings from 15 statin trials involving nearly 100,000 patients, but because each person's data wasn't reviewed, the researchers were unable to pinpoint the reason cancer rates rose as cholesterol fell. Some previous trials found statins raised cancer risk, while others found a decreased rate, Karas adds. When all were taken together in the current study, it becomes clear that on average they have no impact on the risk of cancer, he tells Bloomberg.
Overall, there were 12.7 cancers diagnosed for each 1,000 patients given statins every year, and 12.6 cancers for each 1,000 people in the comparison groups who didn't get the pills. The drugs lowered LDL by an average of 40 points in the studies, without changing the total cancer risk. As a result, the cancer risk was lower in statin patients than in those not taking the drugs at each cholesterol level.
However, The findings aren't definitive and don't prove that getting cholesterol levels down to really low levels is safe when it comes to cancer, Anthony DeMaria, editor-in-chief of the journal, and Ori Ben-Yehuda from the University of California, San Diego Medical Center, wrote in an editorial.
Early, undiagnosed cancers may explain the findings, according to Daniel Steinberg, from the University of California, San Diego. This is known as the "unsuspected sickness phenomenon," which occurs because cancer can significantly lower cholesterol levels up to 10 years before symptoms appear, he wrote in a second editorial.
"If you measure serum cholesterol levels in a large, randomly chosen population and then simply follow that population for 5 years - without intervention of any kind - there will be more cancer deaths in those who had the lowest cholesterol levels to begin with," he tells Bloomberg. "Neither statin treatment itself not the low LDL levels induced by statins increases the risk of cancer."
Statins generated $33.7 billion in sales last year, led by Lipitor, the world's top-selling drug. They work by blocking an enzyme the body needs to produce cholesterol, thereby lowering cholesterol levels. They've been proven to prevent and reduce deaths from heart disease, the leading killer worldwide.
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