Statins can lower the risk for heart disease in people aged more than 75 years, according to the results of a new study.
The report was published on Tuesday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. Previous research hasn’t looked at older adults who take statins.
Organizations including the American Heart Association advise doctors to provide personal risk assessments to determine whether older adults should use statins. The new study found that the medications seem effective in preventing cardiovascular disease and deaths from it in older adults.
Investigators looked at health records of those aged more than 60 years who didn’t have heart disease but started taking statins. Data came from the Hong Kong Hospital Authority.
The participants were put into three groups: People aged 60 and 74, those aged 75 to 84, and people aged 85 or more years. In addition to tracking who was and wasn’t taking statins, the team looked at who experienced a major cardiac event like a stroke, heart failure or death.
All age groups benefited from taking statins, the data showed.
Statins were linked to a lower incidence of heart disease and dying from any cause among those aged 85 or more years who took them. The drugs didn’t seem to increase the risk for adverse effects in older adults.
“These findings will potentially reduce the hesitancy of many physicians to start statin therapy in patients over 75 and may even lead to a change in how our statin guidelines address these older patients,” Cheng-Han Chen, MD, a board-certified interventional cardiologist and medical director of the Structural Heart Program at MemorialCare Saddleback Medical Center in Laguna Hills, CA, said in a Healthline article.
“Considering the increasing burden related to cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the aging population, our study results support the prescription of statin therapy for primary prevention of CVD in old and very old adults,” the authors wrote.
