What are the effects of treating patients with the metabolic syndrome to a high-potency statin?
Treating patients with the metabolic syndrome to a high-potency statin reduced both stroke and cardiovascular events by an additional 20% to 25% compared with a lower dose. Of these subjects, 5584 patients with the metabolic syndrome were randomly assigned to high- or low-dose statin regimens. As expected, the higher dose led to greater reductions in LDL cholesterol (73 versus 99 mg/dL at 3 months). Regardless of treatment assignment, more patients with the metabolic syndrome (11.3%) had a major cardiovascular event than those without the metabolic syndrome (follow-up of 4.9 years, major cardiovascular events occurred in 13% patients receiving the low-dose statin compared with 9.5% receiving the higher dose (HR, 0.71; 95% CI, 0.61 0.84; P<0.0001), and cardiovascular events were reduced by 26% (HR, 0.74; 95% CI, 0.59 0.93; P=0.011). 