Keep taking statins after heart attack: study

From Reuters:
People who are tempted to quit taking their statin medication because it failed to prevent a heart attack should think twice, Canadian researchers said on Wednesday.

They said heart attack survivors who stopped taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs were more likely to die during the following year than those who had never been on the drugs.

The findings, published in the European Heart Journal, underscore the effectiveness of the drugs, which not only reduce levels of low-density lipoprotein or LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol, but may also reduce inflammation.

Dr. Stella Daskalopoulou and colleagues at McGill University studied data on British patients who had survived a heart attack and were still alive three months later.

"Patients who used statins before an AMI (heart attack) and continued to take them after were 16 percent less likely to die over the next year than those who never used them," Daskalopoulou said in a statement. ...more