August 21, 2014

Statin Adherence Increases Diabetes Cases

I admit I don't understand doctors that feel the risk of type 2 diabetes is secondary to the benefits of statin use. Since they do not take statins they have no concern about developing diabetes and therefore they make these statements with no thought about the costs or problems of diabetes.

Yet these doctors still insist the benefits of statins in reducing cardiovascular events clearly overwhelm the diabetes risk. The critical error in the study is that they do not report on cardiovascular events so the study is weighed for the results they wanted to report.

The risk of new-onset diabetes increases with increasing adherence to statin therapy, according to a study published online June 26 in Diabetes Care.

Giovanni Corrao, Ph.D., from the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy, and colleagues examined the correlation between adherence to statin therapy and the risk of developing diabetes in a study involving 115,709 residents of the Italian Lombardy region. Participants were newly treated with statins during 2003 to 2004 and were followed from the index prescription until 2010. Patients who began treatment with an antidiabetic agent or were hospitalized for a main diagnosis of type 2 diabetes (outcome) were identified during this period. The proportion of days covered with statins was measured to determine adherence (exposure).

The researchers found that 11,154 cohort members experienced the outcome during follow-up. The hazard ratios for the exposure-outcome association varied with adherence, with hazard ratios of 1.12 for those with low statin adherence (26 to 50 percent); 1.22 for intermediate adherence (51 to 75 percent); and 1.32 for high adherence (≥75 percent), versus very-low adherence (<25 i="" percent="">

About a tenth of the participants developed type 2 diabetes and this does not seem insignificant to me. This leads me to understand why the rate of diabetes is increasing worldwide at such an alarming rate.

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