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Senior Citizen Health & Medicine
Statins Linked to Lower Risk of Sepsis Infection
Sepsis is the leading cause of death in non-coronary
intensive care
April 6, 2007- Researchers at Johns Hopkins may
have discovered an unintended benefit in the drugs millions of Americans
take to lower their cholesterol: The medications, all statins, seem to
lower the risk of a potentially lethal blood infection known as sepsis
in patients on kidney dialysis. The study is published in the current
issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Sepsis is the leading cause of death in
non-coronary intensive care units in the United States, according to the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control. It also poses serious risk for kidney
patients undergoing regular dialysis treatments.
The Hopkins researchers cautioned that kidney
dialysis patients should not necessarily ask their doctors to put them
on statins until more studies are done to verify their findings.
Building on earlier, limited studies that suggested
risk reduction in animals and some people, Professor of Medicine,
Director of the Welch Center and senior author Neil R. Powe, M.D., and
his Johns Hopkins team followed 1041 dialysis patients for 10 years,
dividing the subjects into those taking statins and those not.
Those taking statins had a 41 in a 1,000 chance of
being hospitalized for sepsis, while the other group not taking statins
had a 110 out of 1,000 risk. Although the overall absolute risk is
relatively small, the statin groups risk is dramatically lower, says
Rajesh Gupta M.D., the studys lead author, who was a senior medical
resident at Hopkins when the study was conducted.
Gupta says it remains unclear why or how statins
work this way, but the consistency of the findings with laboratory
studies adds a lot of credence to the idea that statins are doing
something substantial to reduce risk.
Statins are known to have an effect on the bodys
immune system, but what that is exactly, and how many statin users it
affects, is still not widely understood.
Statins may regulate the immune response to
infection or fight microbes directly, Powe suspects. The studys authors
also suppose that statins may work like penicillin, since the first
statin was originally derived from a fungus which, it is theorized,
secretes a statin as a way to starve other competing microorganisms that
require cholesterol to survive.
The study included patients from 81 dialysis
clinics across 19 states. Only those enrollees who were admitted to the
hospital with sepsis were counted, in order to rule out any subjects who
became septic during an unrelated hospital stay.
Only 14 percent of those initially enrolled in the
study were on statins. Out of the 1,041 patients, there were a total of
303 hospitalizations for sepsis.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of
Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Other investigators include
Laura C. Plantinga, Sc.M., Nancy E. Fink, M.P.H., and Josef Coresh,
M.D., Ph.D., at Johns Hopkins; Michal L. Melamed, M.D., M.H.S., at the
Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Caroline S. Fox, M.D.,
M.P.H., at the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute in Framingham,
Mass.; and Nathan W. Levin, M.D., at the Renal Research Institute in New
York.
The Welch Center is a multidisciplinary research
center affiliated with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and
Bloomberg School of Public Health. The center's work promotes the health
of the public by generating the knowledge required to prevent disease
and its consequences.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/welchcenter
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