Statin use after a diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) was associated with a reduced risk of all-cause and cancer-specific mortality, according to recent research published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
“Our current findings are biologically plausible since statins inhibit not only cholesterol synthesis but also reduce other important downstream products, including membrane integrity maintenance, cell signaling, protein synthesis, and cell-cycle progression,” wrote Aaron P. Thrift, PhD, of the section of epidemiology and population sciences and department of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and his colleagues. “Not only can statins have a direct impact on cancer cells through inhibition of the mevalonate pathway within the cancer cells, but the reduction of circulating cholesterol levels through hepatic pathways is indeed considered important.”
Dr. Thrift and his colleagues performed a retrospective cohort analysis of data from 15,422 patients with HCC in the VA Central Cancer Registry who were diagnosed between 2002 and 2016 and filled a prescription for statins. The researchers looked at statin prescriptions filled prior to and after diagnosis, following patients from diagnosis up to a 3-month lag period. The statins analyzed included atorvastatin, fluvastatin, lovastatin, pravastatin, rosuvastatin, and simvastatin.
Overall, 78.8% of patients died during 26,680 person-years of follow-up and the median survival time was 17.24 months. The researchers found 14.9% of patients (2,293 patients) with HCC filled prescriptions for statins after their cancer diagnosis. The median time to begin statins after diagnosis was 2.37 months, and patients who used statins after diagnosis had a median survival time of 26.38 months compared with 15.67 months for patients who did not use statins after diagnosis. For HCC patients who used statins, there was a decreased risk of all-cause mortality (hazard ratio, 0.89; 95% confidence interval, 0.83-0.95) and cancer-specific mortality (adjusted HR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.77-0.93), which was consistent for both high-dose and low-dose statins and for lag periods between 0 months and 12 months after diagnosis.
Limitations in the study were the exclusion of any statins filled at non-VA pharmacies, baseline differences in statin users and nonstatin users that could have affected results, potential misclassification of cirrhosis in the registry, and the lack of generalization to other populations due to a veteran-specific patient cohort.
This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and VA Health Services Research and Development Service Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness, and Safety. The authors report having no conflicts of interest.
SOURCE: Thrift AP et al. Clin Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2019. doi: 10.1016/j.cgh.2018.12.046.