It appears to rely on the same large dataset used in the this paper Susan posted last July wherein Roberta Brinton et al report encouraging findings that HR in women helps forestall neurodegenerative diseases.
Statin therapy and risk of Alzheimer's and age-related neurodegenerative diseases (2020, retrospective cohort study, n=288,515 participants among US Humana claims, potential COI, some will recognize one of the authors: Roberta Brinton)
I'm not (yet?) educated on interpreting the statistics, so I welcome feedback on that and anything else.Results
Exposure to statins was associated with a lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease (1.10% vs 2.37%; relative risk [RR], 0.4643; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.44-0.49; P < .001), dementia 3.03% vs 5.39%; RR, 0.56; 95% CI, 0.54-0.58; P < .001), multiple sclerosis (0.08% vs 0.15%; RR, 0.52; 95% CI, 0.41-0.66; P < .001), Parkinson's disease (0.48% vs 0.92%; RR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.48-0.58; P < .001), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (0.02% vs 0.05%; RR, 0.46; 95% CI, 0.30-0.69; P < .001). All NDD incidence for all statins, except for fluvastatin (RR, 0.91; 95% CI, 0.65-1.30; P = 0.71), was reduced with variances in individual risk profiles. Pathway analysis indicated unique and common profiles associated with risk reduction efficacy.
HIGHLIGHTS
∙ Statins are associated with decreased incidence of Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
∙ Each statin lowered the incidence of neurodegenerative diseases (NDD) with the exception of fluvastatin.
∙ Pitavastatin and atorvastatin exerted greatest reduction of NDDdiagnosis.
∙ Unique and common pathways of statins were associated with risk reduction profile.
∙ Unique statin targets could advance a precision medicine approach
[Emphasis added]
As always, it's good to review the section about the limitations of the study:
As this study is a retrospective analysis of a claims database, there are several limitations. Importantly, patients included may have obtained services beyond those included in this dataset, such as lifestyle modifications, which are recommended as first-line treatment in addition to the cholesterol-lowering therapies.18 This study used a claims dataset, which relies on the physician’s diagnosis and the ICD code assigned to each patient presentation. Because the diagnosis is clinical, there may be overlap between AD and dementia codes given similar presen- tations despite different underlying pathophysiologies. Furthermore, there could be biases in the prescribing trends for statins that cannot be controlled in the model. Additionally, two statins (pitavastatin and fluvastatin) had fewer than 1000 claims; and select patient demographics (eg, socioeconomic status) are not commonly included in insurance claims and thus were not assessed. Finally, there could be factors, known and unknown, that may not be adequately addressed in this analysis despite propensity-score matching.