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Statins are among the most widely-used medications worldwide to treat common diseases of the heart and blood vessels. Updated NICE guidelines are expanding the prescription of statins even further, but concerns around neuropsychiatric adverse events may be a barrier to statins prescribing in people with mental illness.
This new study of more than one million people with depression in England shows that statin use is associated with lower mortality and no increased adverse events, including neuropsychiatric ones. It has been published in BMJ Mental Health.
The authors used QResearch primary care electronic health records to include a large “real-world” (including patients with several comorbidities and concomitant medications) sample of 1,050,105 people with depression
The study showed that people with depression who were taking a statin died less and had fewer total adverse events compared to people with depression not taking a statin
Dr Riccardo De Giorgi, study author and Clinical Lecturer in General Adult Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry, said:
This large study in people with depression may be important for public health: it emphasises that these patients too may benefit from statin prescription, similarly to other severe mental illnesses such as psychosis."