This content originally appeared on On a regular basis Health. Republished with permission.
By Lisa Rapaport
There’s a each day pill which will help lower “bad” cholesterol and reduce deaths from heart disease in individuals who experience intolerable unintended effects with statins, a brand new study suggests.
The study included about 4,200 patients with statin intolerance, or an inability to proceed statin therapy resulting from unintended effects, who were randomly assigned to either a each day bempedoic acid pill or a placebo. All of the participants had dangerously high levels of low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol that put them at high risk for heart attacks and strokes.
After about 40 months of follow-up, patients on bempedoic acid were 30 percent less prone to die of cardiovascular causes or experience events like heart attacks or strokes than people within the placebo group, in line with study results published June 24 in JAMA.
“This can be a huge reduction,” says the lead study writer, Steven Nissen, MD, a cardiologist on the Cleveland Clinic who presented the findings on the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Diego.
Why Do Doctors Prescribe Statins?
Cholesterol-lowering statins have long been advisable to stop repeat heart attacks in individuals with high levels of cholesterol. More recently, leading medical groups just like the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology have advisable that folks with none history of heart disease consider statins in the event that they have certain heart problems risk aspects, corresponding to obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, elevated cholesterol, or a smoking habit.
But only about half of people that should take statins to stop a primary heart attack do it, Dr. Nissen says. “We’ve got to do higher than treating only 50 percent of eligible patients,” he says.
Muscle pain is amongst essentially the most common unintended effects of statins, in line with the Mayo Clinic. Other unintended effects include elevated blood sugar and an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, liver damage, and neurological unintended effects like memory loss and confusion. Certain persons are at increased risk of those unintended effects, including females, elderly individuals, individuals with kidney or liver disease, heavy drinkers, and other people who take multiple medicines to lower cholesterol.
What Is Bempedoic Acid (Nexletol)?
Bempedoic acid (Nexletol), the drug tested in the brand new study, is currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to lower cholesterol in certain patients with an inherited sort of dangerously high cholesterol and certain individuals with atherosclerosis, a hardening and thickening of the arteries that may increase the chance of heart attacks and strokes.
In essentially the most recent study, bempedoic acid lowered LDL cholesterol levels by 22 percent.
Just 5.3 percent of patients taking this drug died of cardiovascular causes or had events like heart attacks or strokes, compared with 7.6 percent of individuals taking a placebo pill. This translates right into a 30 percent lower risk of death from heart disease or serious cardiac events. These results echo previous studies that found similar LDL cholesterol-lowering effects.
Prevention Is Key When It Involves Heart Disease
There have been no serious unintended effects with bempedoic acid through the study, although lab tests found that patients on the drug had more markers of problems within the kidney and liver with this drug than with the placebo. As well as, the study found no difference in the speed of latest type 2 diabetes cases between bempedoic acid and the placebo.
These results are a “wake-up call” that more patients must be treated with cholesterol-lowering drugs, Nissen says. “We all know early prevention measures are critical to slowing the progression of heart disease, especially for individuals with comorbidities like diabetes,” Nissen adds.
Additional reporting by Ross Wollen.