NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Patients who stop taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs after suffering a heart attack are at twice the risk of dying during the following year compared with patients who have never used statins, new research findings suggest.

Using data on 9,939 British patients who survived an acute heart attack and were still alive 3 months later, researchers found that those who discontinued their statin medication were 88 percent more likely to die during the following year compared to those who had never been on the medication.

"A strong harmful effect" of statin discontinuation after heart attack was shown, Dr. Stella S. Daskalopoulou, at McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, and co-investigators report in the latest issue of the European Heart Journal.

"Statins were found to be beneficial drugs," Daskalopoulou added in a written statement. "Patients who used statins before (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. So even if it appears that the statins failed to prevent your (heart attack), it is beneficial to continue taking them and potentially quite harmful to stop," the researcher added.

In the general population, the statin discontinuation rate within the first year of prescription is 30 percent. "That's very high," Daskalopoulou said.

"Because statins are preventative drugs, patients may not feel the immediate benefit of taking them and sometimes stop. However, it looks like this might be quite a dangerous practice after a (heart attack)," the researcher warned.

In a commentary on the study, Dr. Christopher Heeschen, at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and colleagues note that these findings corroborate previous studies demonstrating the short-term hazards of stopping statin treatment after a heart attack.

"Therefore," they conclude, "the continuation of statin therapy following onset of acute coronary syndromes is crucial and is probably most important in patients at high cardiovascular risk."

SOURCE: European Heart Journal, September 2008.

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