{"id":33007,"date":"2012-11-07T17:00:46","date_gmt":"2012-11-07T22:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/?post_type=news&#038;p=33007"},"modified":"2012-11-07T17:13:14","modified_gmt":"2012-11-07T22:13:14","slug":"statins-use-linked-to-reduction-in-cancer-mortality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2012\/11\/07\/statins-use-linked-to-reduction-in-cancer-mortality\/","title":{"rendered":"Statins Use Linked to Reduction in Cancer Mortality"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A large new study raises the possibility that statin use may lead to a decline in cancer mortality. Researchers in Denmark used health data from the entire population of the country and analyzed the information from nearly 300,000 patients who were diagnosed with cancer between 1995 and 2007. The authors note that the relationship is\u00a0biologically plausible, since cholesterol synthesis is required for cell proliferation and other critical cellular functions.<\/p>\n<p>In their paper, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nejm.org\/doi\/full\/10.1056\/NEJMoa1201735\">published in the\u00a0<em>New England Journal of Medicine<\/em><\/a>, the researchers compared\u00a018,721 cancer patients who were statin users prior to their diagnosis with 277,204 who had never used statins. Here are the adjusted hazard ratios for statin users:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>All-cause mortality: 0.85 (0.83-0.87)<\/li>\n<li>Death from cancer: 0.85 (0.82-0.87)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A similar and consistent pattern was noted for different types of cancer, although these differences did not always achieve statistical significance. No dose-response relationship was observed in the study.<\/p>\n<p>In\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nejm.org\/doi\/full\/10.1056\/NEJMe1210002\">an accompanying editorial<\/a>, Neil Caporaso\u00a0notes that despite the considerable strengths of the study, which used data from the entire country of Denmark, the researchers were nevertheless unable to account for residual confouding differences between statin users and nonusers. The &#8220;consistent and substantial declines in mortality across diverse cancers&#8221; \u00a0need to be interpreted with caution, he wrote. Caporaso suggests a variety of different research directions for further study of the important question of the relationship between statins and cancer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A large new study raises the possibility that statin use may lead to a decline in cancer mortality. Researchers in Denmark used health data from the entire population of the country and analyzed the information from nearly 300,000 patients who were diagnosed with cancer between 1995 and 2007. The authors note that the relationship is\u00a0biologically [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[416,584],"class_list":["post-33007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-prevention","tag-cancer","tag-statins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33007","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\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}