Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 23, 1995 TAG: 9503230100
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: 1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS LENGTH: Medium
The results show that giving the drug simvastatin to heart patients reduced their hospital admissions by one-third during five years of treatment.
It also reduced the number of days that they had to spend in the hospital and reduced the need for bypass surgery and angioplasty.
``This is both good medicine and good economics,'' said Dr. Sanford Schwartz, a physician and economist at the University of Pennsylvania.
The findings are the latest to be presented from the Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study, a landmark examination of the health effects of lowering cholesterol.
The study was conducted on 4,444 volunteers. Its initial results, presented last November, showed that the treatment reduced the risk of death by 30 percent in patients who already had suffered heart attacks or angina pain.
At this week's meeting of the American College of Cardiology, the same team showed that the treatment also can have a major impact on hospital costs.
But like most medical treatments, this one does not actually save money. Hospital costs were $8 million lower among the 2,221 volunteers who got simvastatin rather than dummy pills - but the medicine itself cost $11 million, Schwartz said.
Nonetheless, Schwartz said the treatment is highly ``cost-effective'' compared with other widely accepted therapies and tests.
Lowering cholesterol costs between $5,000 and $10,000 for each year of life it saves. In comparison, mammograms to screen for breast cancer cost $30,000 to $35,000 per year of life.
About one-fourth of U.S. heart patients now get cholesterol-lowering drugs. While the drugs have been available for years, doctors have been reluctant to give them routinely because of doubts whether they do any good.
Simvastatin is one of four similar cholesterol-lowering medicines now on the market. It is made by Merck & Co., which paid for the study but not Schwartz's economic analysis.
Among the latest findings, presented by Dr. Terje Pedersen of Aker University Hospital in Oslo, Norway:
Simvastatin treatment reduced the total number of days patients had to spend in the hospital for heart problems by 34 percent.
The treatment reduced the need for bypass surgery and angioplasty, both used to open up clogged heart arteries, by 32 percent.
Strokes and less serious brain blood flow disruptions, called transient ischemic attacks, were also reduced by nearly one-third in the simvastatin patients.
Memo: NOTE: Shorter version ran in Metro edition.