Brief Report: Association Between Statin Use and Cardiovascular Mortality at the Population Level: An Ecologic Study

We assessed the contribution of statin use to the decline in cardiovascular mortality for The Netherlands over the period 1994-2010.

We combined aggregated mortality data from Statistics Netherlands with dispensing data from a representative drug dispensing database. We estimated mortality as if prevalence of statin use had remained at its observed 1994 levels throughout the period 1994-2010 for acute myocardial infarction, other ischemic heart disease, and cerebrovascular disease using Poisson models adjusted for various confounders.

We estimated that keeping prevalence of statin use at observed 1994 levels would have resulted in 6.3 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 4.9, 7.8), 1.6 (95% CI = 0.8, 2.6), and 3.4 (95% CI = 2.2, 4.6) more acute myocardial infarction, ischemic heart disease, and cerebrovascular deaths per 10,000 person-years, respectively.

The findings indicate that statin therapy was associated with decreasing national cardiovascular mortality rates in the period 1994 to 2010.