Statin Use in Women

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the leading cause of death in U.S. women; moreover, since 1983, more women than men have died of CVD annually.1 In secondary prevention settings, statins reduce risk for recurrent CVD events and CVD mortality, with benefits of comparable magnitude in men and women.2 Although primary prevention studies have shown that statin therapy lowers the incidence of cardiovascular events by about 20%, the study populations predominantly included men; hence, questions remain about the efficacy and safety of statins for preventing CVD in women. Primary Prevention CVD primary prevention trials have been grossly underpowered with respect to enrollment of women, limiting the ability to stratify results by sex. This lack of adequate data has often been interpreted as a lack of statin efficacy for primary prevention in women. Recently, however, a large meta-analysis of 22 statin therapy trials with >174,000 participants (27% women) demonstrated that statin therapy has similar effectiveness for preventing both primary and secondary major CVD events and CVD-related mortality in women and men.3 The results showed that, for every reduction of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) by 1 mmol/L (18 mg/dL), CVD events in women were reduced by 15% in primary prevention.3 Furthermore, among women with 5-year risk <10%, statin therapy lowered …