Among the beneficial byproducts of taking statins:
Statins Tied to Better Prostate Cancer Outcomes
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
A new study suggests that men with prostate cancer who take statins may have a lower risk of dying from the disease than those who do not.
Statins are not recommended for prostate cancer prevention or treatment. But researchers studied 1,001 prostate cancer patients diagnosed between 2002 and 2005, of whom 289 used statins, which are given mainly to lower cholesterol. They followed them for an average of six years, during which there were 123 total deaths, 39 from prostate cancer.
The study, published online last week in The Prostate, found no association of statins with recurrence or progression of prostate cancer, or with death from any other cause. But after controlling for age, smoking, body mass index, severity of disease, type of treatment, history of diabetes and many other variables, they found that non-users were five times as likely to die of prostate cancer as those who used statins.
“This raises the flag that these medications may be useful for secondary prevention,” said the senior author, Janet L. Stanford, a professor of epidemiology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, “and may warrant doing a clinical study to test in a randomized trial whether these meds can help reduce mortality.”
Gordon
