are statins worth the price?

By Doug Donaldson

One often unmentioned side effect of taking higher doses of statin drugs to control cholesterol is the emptying of your wallet. The drugs may not always be delivering the benefits to justify the costs, according to a study by the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center and the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System.
           
Patients with acute coronary syndrome do reap enough health benefits from higher, more costly doses of statin drugs, but patients with blockages and stable symptoms may not need to spend the extra money, the study determined.
           
“We found that intensive treatment with statins, a treatment with proven effectiveness, has very different effects depending on who you are,” says Sandeep Vijan, senior author and associate professor of general internal medicine at the University of Michigan. “If you are a very high-risk patient who was just in the hospital for a heart attack, you get lots of benefit from high doses of statins, and treatment is therefore cost-effective. But if you are a patient who has more stable heart disease, the benefit is much lower—only about one-quarter of that seen in the high-risk group—and the treatment is probably not cost-effective most of the time.”