PCSK9 Antibody-based Treatment Strategies for Patients With Statin Intolerance

Statin intolerance refers to the inability of a patient to tolerate statin therapy, presenting muscle aches, pains, weakness and muscle inflammation. Thus, numerous patients are not treated with suitable statin-based therapy or take only very low doses. As a result, the desired decrease in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is not achieved, resulting in patients at a high risk for cardiovascular events, requiring an alternative lipid-lowering treatment. Common treatments manage to reduce the LDL-C level by up to 20%. Recently, new alternative treatment options have been proved to lower the LDL-C level by up to 70%. These treatment strategies are based on human monoclonal antibodies against protein convertase subtilisin/kexin 9 (PCSK9).

Herein, we review the efficiency of anti-PCSK9 in treatment of hypercholesterolemic patients with statin intolerance. We focused on the use of PCSK9 inhibitors in statin-intolerant patients and we estimated the clinical results concerning the reduction of the mean LDL-C concentration and the side effects that were observed.

In the majority of cases, treatment strategy based on PCSK9 was successful and achieved the end-points.

PCSK9 inhibition can be considered as a treatment of option for lipid-lowering in statin-intolerant patients.