A new study out of Stanford School of Medicine says that cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins that can help prevent heart disease are still underprescribed for many at-risk patients.
Study author Dr. Jun Ma, a research associate at the Stanford Prevention Research Center says that only 50 percent of high-risk patients who visit doctors receive statins and people may die prematurely because of inadequate treatment. Ma says that people who should receive these drugs but don't are put at greater risk of heart disease.
Each year, more than half a million people die from heart disease, which along with cancer is one of the nation's leading killers.
Statins and blood-pressure medications such as beta blockers, are important because they reduce the risk factors that cause heart disease. Statins cut cholesterol production in the liver and boost the organ's ability to remove a "bad" cholesterol known as LDL.
A renewed emphasis on how lifestyle factors, including exercise and diet, can reduce heart disease risks was called for in the study, as was the importance of Cholesterol checks for adults.
Senior author of the study Dr. Randall Stafford, an associate professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, says risk-lowering lifestyle changes are still overlooked and one of the problems is that turning this evidence into practice has not been effective.
Apparently this study is the first to examine how statin therapy varies according to the risk of heart disease among U.S. outpatients.
The researchers examined two national databases that track outpatient visits to hospitals and physicians between 1992 and 2002, and the medications prescribed or renewed during those visits. The results were compared with the number of patients who had been diagnosed with high cholesterol levels and varying degrees of risk for heart disease.