A new study led by researchers at the Nuffield Department of Population Health’s Economics of Population Health Research Centre has found that while statin therapy reduces the rates of hospital admissions and prescription medications over a person's lifetime, it also leads to greater overall healthcare use in the long run because people taking statins live longer.
The findings highlight the need for long-term healthcare planning to accommodate changing patterns of demand. The study is published in Value in Health.
Statins are widely prescribed to lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes and death from cardiovascular disease. The clinical benefits and cost-effectiveness of statin therapy are well established but, until now, little was known about how statins affect people's use of health services, such as hospital admissions, GP consultations, tests and prescriptions, over the course of their lives.
In this study, researchers used data from over 500,000 UK Biobank participants, including their hospital records and, for about 200,000 of them, also their primary care records. They built statistical models estimating how much healthcare people used following a major cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack, stroke, or coronary revascularisation procedure, and integrated these into a validated cardiovascular disease microsimulation model. This allowed them to simulate lifetime patterns of healthcare use for people with and without statin treatment, across four groups defined by age (40–60 and 60–70 years) and whether they had prior history of cardiovascular disease.
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Population Health website.