Silvia Fernandez, PIONEER NEWS
(PiercePioneer.com) — A new study has examined the statin guidelines for prevention of cardiovascular events to discover that tens of thousands of heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular-related deaths could be avoided if they would prescribe the drugs to more patients with higher risks.
“The new cholesterol treatment guidelines have been controversial, so our goal for this study was to use the best available evidence to quantify the tradeoffs in health benefits, risks, and costs of expanding statin treatment. We found that the new guidelines represent good value for money spent on healthcare, and that more lenient treatment thresholds might be justifiable on cost-effectiveness grounds even accounting for side-effects such as diabetes and myalgia,” explains lead study author Ankur Pandya, who is an assistant professor of health decision science at Harvard Chan School.
###