Beyond The Abstract - Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs And Prostate Cancer Risk: A Population-Based Case-Control Study

Main Category: Prostate / Prostate Cancer
Also Included In: Statins;  Urology / Nephrology;  Men's health
Article Date: 20 Jan 2008 - 0:00 PDT

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UroToday.com - This is a large case-control study estimating prostate cancer incidence among users of statins and other cholesterol-lowering drugs in a study population of 24,723 case-control pairs. It is a register-based study including all newly diagnosed prostate cancer cases in Finland during 1995-2002 and individually matched controls. The information on medication use has been obtained from a prescription database providing detailed information for each man in the study population.

In the study we found that use of statins, but not other cholesterol-lowering drugs (fibrates, bile-acid binding resins or acipimox) is associated with decreased risk of advanced prostate cancer in a dose-dependent manner, whereas overall prostate cancer risk was not affected in users of any cholesterol-lowering drugs. Of the individual statins, the risk of advanced cancer was decreased in users of atorvastatin, lovastatin and simvastatin.

These finding are in concordance with the latest results on this field. However, this is the first study to comprehensively evaluate the risk in users of other cholesterol-lowering drugs as well as individual statins.

Study strengths include large study population and detailed information on medication use allowing analyses of prostate cancer risk according to time and dosage of the use. The main weakness is the missing information on serum PSA testing. Thus, confounding caused by opportunistic PSA testing among the study population could not be controlled for. However, the prevalence of opportunistic PSA screening in the Finnish population is reportedly low (less than 20%), albeit increasing. In the future these results need to be confirmed by a study controlling for the effect of PSA testing.

Written by

Murtola TJ, MD, as part of Beyond the Abstract on UroToday.com. This initiative offers a method of publishing for the professional urology community. Authors are given an opportunity to expand on the circumstances, limitations etc... of their research by referencing the published abstract.

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