Rosuvastatin and risk of acute pancreatitis in a population-based case-control study

Few data exist about the relationship between rosuvastatin use and acute pancreatitis. We tested a plausible hypothesis that rosuvastatin use might be associated with acute pancreatitis in Taiwan.

We designed a case-control study using a randomly sampled database of the Taiwan National Health Insurance Program. We identified 5728 subjects with the first episode of acute pancreatitis in 1998-2011 as the case group and we randomly selected 22,912 sex- and age-matched subjects without acute pancreatitis as the control group. Subjects who never received a rosuvastatin prescription were defined as never use of rosuvastatin. Subjects who at least received 1 prescription for rosuvastatin within 7 days before the date of diagnosing acute pancreatitis were defined as active use of rosuvastatin. Subjects who did not receive a prescription within 7 days but at least received 1 prescription for rosuvastatin ≥ 8 days before the date of diagnosing acute pancreatitis were defined as non-active use of rosuvastatin. Those at least receiving 1 prescription for other statins or non-statin lipid-lowering drugs were excluded from this study. We estimated the odds ratio with 95% confidence interval for acute pancreatitis associated with rosuvastatin use by using the multivariable unconditional logistic regression model.

The multivariable analysis disclosed that the adjusted odds ratio for acute pancreatitis in subjects with active use of rosuvastatin was 3.21 (95% confidence interval 1.70, 6.06). The adjusted odds ratio was 0.90 in subjects with non-active use of rosuvastatin (95% confidence interval 0.67, 1.19), without statistical significance.

We observed active use of rosuvastatin to be associated with increased risk for acute pancreatitis.