Health and Lifestyle

Febuary 1, 2001

Progress on the fight against diabetes.

For a number of years scientists have been developing "statin" a cholesterol-lowering drug to help reduce the risk of another heart attack and the need for artery opening procedures in people with diabetes and hear disease. In December of 1998, Circulation, the Journal of the American Heart Association, reported the findings of the most recent study indicating that indeed people with diabetes and heart disease who have average blood levels of cholesterol would benefit from statin drug therapy.

Dr. Frank M. Sacks co-author of the report said that compared with diabetic patients who received Pravastatin had a 25 per cent reduction in relative risk of having another heart attack. And, the relative risk of needing coronary artery bypass or angioplasty to unblock blood vessels was reduced by 32 per cent in the statin-treated group of those tested.

Now, on January 23, 2001, Circulation reported that the statin drug used has shown it reduces the risk of Type 2 diabetes.

"This is significant because it is the first time that treatment with a statin has been shown to have an impact on the development of diabetes," stated Dr. Allan Gaw, the senior author of the January article.

Dr. Gaw's team made the discovery by analyzing data from the West of Scotland Coronary Prevention Study designed to determine the effectiveness of Pravastatin in preventing a first hear attack in people with high cholesterol.

They found that those given Pravastatin had a 30 per cent reduced risk of developing diabetes.

He and his colleagues used data from 5,974 men, ages 45 to 64, to examine the effect of Pravastatin on the development of diabetes. Among the men, 153, or 2.6 per cent, developed the disease. The 30 per cent risk reduction for diabetes that they found among Pravastatin users was an attention getter. However, Dr. Gaw cautioned that further randomized studies are needed to confirm the findings.

"Also, we need to do some more basic science work to unravel the precise mechanism for this interesting and potentially very important finding," he added.

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