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| |  ESC: Fluvastatin Prevents Major Adverse Coronary Events after Angioplasty Among Diabetics By Ed Susman VIENNA, AUSTRIA -- September 2, 2003 -- Diabetic patients undergoing angioplasty can reduce their risk of having a major adverse cardiac event by half if they take the lipid-lowering drug fluvastatin, researchers said here Sept. 2nd during the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2003. "In fact, diabetes patients who take fluvastatin reduce their risk of adverse events to the level of patients who are not diabetic," said Dr. Francesco Saia, MD, a research fellow at the Thoraxcenter, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Fluvastatin reduced the risk of major adverse cardiac events in diabetic patients by 51%, Dr. Saia reported. "The presence of diabetes increased the risk of major adverse cardiac events by almost two-fold in placebo-treated patients in the Lescol® Intervention Prevention Study (LIPS)," Dr. Saia said during his poster presentation. "Treatment with fluvastatin makes diabetic patients equal to those who are not diabetic." In the subanalysis of the LIPS Study, Dr. Saia and colleagues scrutinized the outcomes of diabetic patients who had undergone percutaneous coronary intervention. In the study 120 patients diabetic patients received fluvastatin and 82 were given placebo. No distinction was made between Type I and Type II diabetes. After 4 years, about 20% of the diabetics on fluvastatin compared with about 45% of those who received placebo had experienced a major adverse coronary event -- death, non-fatal myocardial infarction or a re-intervention procedure such as a repeat angioplasty, angioplasty to open a new lesion or coronary artery bypass graft surgery. The difference between the two groups reached statistical significance at the p=0.0088 level. He noted that about 25% patients who had coronary artery disease but were not diabetics and were in the placebo group experienced major adverse cardiac events in the trial -- about the same rate of events as the diabetics on fluvastatin. About 15% of patients on fluvastatin who were not diabetic experienced end point events as well. "You can see that all the three groups -- diabetics on fluvastatin and other non-diabetics -- have distinctly lower event rates than the diabetics who were not taking fluvastatin," Dr. Saia said. In the LIPS trial, the average cholesterol reduction was about 30%, he noted. The study was supported by Novartis.
[Study title: Fluvastatin prevents cardiac events following successful percutaneous coronary intervention in patients with diabetes: the Lescol® Intervention Prevention Study. Eur Heart J 2003; 24:Suppl. Aug/Sept:577. Abstract P2972]
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