{"id":1458,"date":"2010-03-09T20:09:47","date_gmt":"2010-03-10T01:09:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/which-focus-for-statin-therapy-treat-more-patients-or-ensure-better-adherence\/"},"modified":"2011-07-19T17:45:09","modified_gmt":"2011-07-19T21:45:09","slug":"which-focus-for-statin-therapy-treat-more-patients-or-ensure-better-adherence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2010\/03\/09\/which-focus-for-statin-therapy-treat-more-patients-or-ensure-better-adherence\/","title":{"rendered":"Which Focus for Statin Therapy: Treat More Patients or Ensure Better Adherence?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Millions of people who take statins to reduce their cholesterol levels do not adhere to their prescribed regimens. That\u2019s troubling in light of estimates from a recent analysis of data from more than 40,000 participants in the <a href=\"http:\/\/cardioexchange.org\/jwatch\/cardiology\/content\/full\/2010\/217\/3\">Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study<\/a>. It showed that if the percentage of patients with at least 80% adherence to their statin regimens increased from 50% to 75%, that improvement would prevent twice as many cardiovascular deaths as would lowering the threshold for statin treatment from a 20% or greater 10-year risk for heart disease to a 15.5% or greater 10-year risk.<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nOther research suggests that <a href=\"http:\/\/content.nejm.org\/cgi\/content\/full\/353\/5\/487\">nonadherence to medications of all types <\/a>costs the U.S. healthcare system about $100 billion per year in hospital admissions. Given numbers like these (in lives saved and dollars spent), has the time come to focus more on ensuring that high-risk patients actually adhere to statin therapy than on nibbling around the edges by extending statin therapy to lower- and lower-risk individuals? Or do you think that the battle against nonadherence is inevitably a losing one? Say what you think right here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Millions of people who take statins to reduce their cholesterol levels do not adhere to their prescribed regimens. That\u2019s troubling in light of estimates from a recent analysis of data from more than 40,000 participants in the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study. It showed that if the percentage of patients with at least 80% adherence to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-prevention"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/169"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}