Are statins beneficial for chronic heart failure?

This Living FRISBEE (Living FRIendly Summary of the Body of Evidence using Epistemonikos) is an update of an article published in May 2015 (doi: 10.5867/medwave.2015.04.6140), based on the detection of nine new systematic reviews. Even though statins decrease inflammatory markers and improve some echocardiographic parameters in heart failure, it is not clear whether they have an impact on clinically important outcomes. Searching in Epistemonikos database, which is maintained by screening multiple databases, we identified 14 systematic reviews including 25 randomized trials answering the question of interest. We extracted data, combined the evidence using meta-analysis and generated a summary of findings table following the GRADE approach. We concluded statins do not decrease mortality in chronic heart failure, and might lead to a small reduction in hospital admissions for heart failure, but the certainty of this evidence is low.