"Statin" cholesterol medications benefit women!
The medical community has always known the benefits of "statin" medications such as simvastatin, lovastatin, and lipitor. The medications have been proven to decrease cardiovascular disease by lowering cholesterol and decreasing damage to the arteries around your heart through decreasing inflammation. However, most studies to prove this data up until this point have involved male populations.
Finally a Meta-Analysis from Massachusetts General Hospital involing over 40,000 women and 18 studies, has shown that statins are as effective in women as in men for the reduction of cardiovascular outcomes and all-cause mortality, leaving investigators to conclude that statins should be used in all appropriate patients regardless of sex.
"There have been a large number of clinical trials looking at the benefits of statin use, but the ability for us to prove that the benefits extend to both men and women has been limited, in part because of numbers," lead investigator Dr William Kostis (Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston) told heartwire . "There have been studies that have shown benefits in men, and where they have shown a trend toward benefit in women they were unable to show a statistically significant difference. Because of this, we undertook the meta-analysis, and what we found was what we had hoped to find, and that was that the benefits of reducing cardiovascular outcomes and all-cause mortality extend to both men and women."
The meta-analysis, published in the February 7, 2012 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology
