Cholesterol drugs are found to reduce blood clots

New results from a large study suggest that the drugs known as statins may have a benefit beyond lowering cholesterol: reducing the risk of developing blood clots in the veins.

The study, published on the Web site of The New England Journal of Medicine and presented Sunday at an American College of Cardiology convention, found that relatively healthy people who took a potent statin were 43 percent less likely than those who took a placebo to get a blood clot known as venous thromboembolism.

The clots, which often develop in the legs, can be fatal if they travel to the lungs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that up to 600,000 Americans get venous clots each year and that at least 100,000 die from them. The risk of suffering blood clots increases with age, and people who are obese, have certain genetic abnormalities or have been inactive because of surgery or injury are more prone to develop them.

The results are from a large study called Jupiter, led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, that looked into the effects of statins on people without high cholesterol or histories of heart disease. It involved 17,802 people — men 50 and older, and women 60 and older — in 26 countries who took either a statin or a placebo.

The main Jupiter findings, published in November, were that the statin lowered the risk of heart attack by more than half and significantly lowered the risk of stroke, angioplasty, bypass surgery and death. As a result, national medical panels are considering broadening guidelines on who should be taking statins.

Studying blood clots was a secondary goal, said Jupiter's lead investigator, Dr. Paul M. Ridker, the director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease at Brigham and Women's Hospital. With the relatively healthy people in the study, the number of clots was small — 94 total — but the placebo group developed 60 of them, compared with 34 for those taking the statin.

Ridker said common treatments for people who have had blood clots, usually several months of anti-coagulants like warfarin or heparin, can cause hemorrhaging and require frequent monitoring. But blood clot reduction in the study "came without risk of hemorrhage at all," he said.

Jupiter is the first clinical trial to consider the effect of statins on blood clots in randomly selected people, although smaller studies have suggested similar results, including a 2008 review at Albert Einstein Medical Center in New York of the records of cancer patients who took statins.