Statin and Other Antilipemic Use and Prostate Cancer: Results from the EPICAP Study

Antilipemic drugs have been hypothesized to decrease the risk of several cancers; however, results are still conflicting for prostate cancer.

We used data from the EPICAP study, a French population-based case-control study including 819 incident prostate cancer cases and 879 population-based controls frequency-matched by age. Detailed information on the use of antilipemic drugs has been collected.

The use of overall antilipemic drugs was not associated with prostate cancer risk, whereas the use of statins, and particularly lipophilic statins, was inversely associated with high-grade prostate cancer with an International Society of Urological Pathology score ≥4 [OR = 0.52; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.27-1.00; OR = 0.30; 95% CI, 0.12-0.77, respectively]. When taking into account the duration of use, long duration (≥10 years) of statin and lipophilic statin was inversely associated with prostate cancer overall (OR = 0.69; 95% CI, 0.47-1.01; OR = 0.54; 95% CI, 0.35-0.85, respectively) and with high-grade prostate cancer (OR = 0.49; 95% CI, 0.24-1.01; OR = 0.26, 95% CI, 0.09-0.72, respectively).

Our results showed an inverse association between high-grade prostate cancer and statins, particularly lipophilic statins, and indicated that these associations were more pronounced for long duration.

In a context of overdiagnosis and overtreatment, identifying factors associated with aggressive prostate cancers is important and could help improving targeted screening strategies.