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Going on a statin? Take a close look at the size of the benefit.

Article Excerpt
The current practice of advising healthy adults to go on prolonged drug therapy just got a big boost from a large international trial. It found that healthy people with normal cholesterol can halve their risk for heart attack and stroke by taking the cholesterol-lowering statin drug Crestor (generic name: rosuvastatin). Although at low risk for heart disease, all the participants had high blood levels of C-reactive protein, or CRP, which indicates the presence of inflammation within the artery walls.

This trial, which is expected to greatly expand the market for Crestor, was funded by its maker, Astra-Zeneca. And it is the brainchild of the lead author Paul M. Ridker, MD, who co-owns the patent on the CRP test. The 17,802 participants--men 50 or older and women 60 or older--were randomly assigned to take either 20 mg Crestor or a placebo each day. Results were so definitively in favor of Crestor that the trial was stopped three years ahead of its five-year schedule. Millions more healthy Americans are now candidates for Crestor, and there is talk of including a CRP screening with the routine blood test for cholesterol.

The findings from this trial called JUPITER were first presented early last month at a meeting of the American Heart Association. The next day, they became freely accessible at...

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