A new way of predicting cardiovascular risks suggests that 40 percent fewer people need to be on statins to prevent heart disease, according to a Monday study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. “We don’t want people to think they were treated incorrectly in the past. They were treated with the best data we had when the PCE (a cardiovascular risk calculator) was introduced back in 2013,” Dr.
Timothy Anderson, lead author of the study, said in a news release. “The data have changed,” he added. Dr.
Anderson noted that a person’s risk of developing atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease can change over time. “For a patient who we now know is at lower risk than we previously thought, if we recommend they stop taking statins, they still could be back to a higher risk five years down the road, for the simple reason that everybody’s risk goes up as we get older,” he said. Unlike PCEs, PREVENT accounts for clinical factors, including cardiovascular and kidney issues, recognizing the link between cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic health.
Also, unlike PCE, PREVENT does not take race and ethnicity into consideration. PREVENT was developed to determine risks within the current population more accurately, as the PCE was based on patient data from the 1940s to the 1980s. The researchers looked at data from 3,785 adults between the ages of 40 and 75 who were part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between January 2017 and March 2020.
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