DALLAS, Dec. 8 -- A cholesterol-lowering drug may help reduce the risk of another heart attack and the need for artery-opening procedures in people with diabetes and heart disease who have average blood levels of cholesterol, according to a study in today's issue of Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
The study involved a subgroup of 586 diabetic individuals in the Cholesterol and Recurrent Events (CARE) trial, a five-year study that compared therapy using the drug pravastatin to placebo in men and women who had a previous heart attack and average blood levels of cholesterol.
"Although diabetes is a major risk factor for heart disease, little information is available on the effects of cholesterol-lowering therapies in individuals with diabetes," says co-author Frank M. Sacks, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. Because the CARE trial population -- a total of 4,159 patients from 80 clinical centers in the United States and Canada -- included a large number of individuals, scientists had enough data to determine whether pravastatin therapy reduced the risk of recurrent heart attack or the need for treatment to unblock the arteries in people with diabetes.
Pravastatin is one of the statin class of cholesterol-lowering drugs called HMG CoA inhibitors.
Sacks reports that, compared with those in the placebo group, diabetic patients who received pravastatin had a 25 percent reduction in relative risk of having another heart attack. The relative risk of needing coronary artery bypass or angioplasty to unblock blood vessels was reduced by 32 percent in the statin-treated group.
The researchers also analyzed data from a subgroup of 342 people without
diabetes who met the American Diabetes Association's definition of being glucose
intolerant (fasting blood glucose levels between 110 to 125 mg/dL). "This
subgroup had a higher rate of coronary events, such as recu
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Contact: Carole Bullock
caroleb@heart.org
214-706-1279
American Heart Association
7-Dec-1998