Statin patients also face heart risk, says study

Patients, who consume cholesterol lowering drug are also at risk of heart attacks, according to a study by Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The research team has found out genetic variations which increase the risk of a heart attack even when a person is on medication and taking a drug like Lipitor, to lower blood cholesterol.

The findings have helped explain the reason behind patients experiencing heart attacks while talking statins. The study published in journal Circulation suggested that targeting the genetic variations could reduce the heart risk in the patients.

The team kept a vigilance on some of the patients for up to a decade after they started their statin drug. The study discovered that the effect of genetic variations was independent of how much their cholesterol improved when they were taking statins.

Joshua Denny, paper's corresponding author said that patients with the genetic variants had higher risks of getting a heart ailment.

The research team found 3,099 people who had suffered a heart attack while they were on statins. The team then compared these people to 7,681 ‘control’ patients who were on statins and did not experience any heart disease.

After comparing the two, the researchers managed to identify seven genetic variations, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms in the LPA locus of genes which were associated with the heart events in patients taking statin treatment.