Statins 'cut cancer' risk

2005-05-16 09:19

Orlando - Cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins also cut the risk of breast cancer by more than 50%, according to research made public at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology conference.

Statins, found in popular drugs such as Lipitor or Zocor, can also lower the risk of lung or prostate cancer by 48% and 54% respectively, according to separate recent studies.

"If our results are confirmed, I think statins will have a significant chemopreventive role in women at high risk for breast cancer," said Vikas Khurana, an assistant professor of medicine at Louisiana University Health Science Centre at Shreveport and the study's senior author, speaking at the ASCO conference here late on Saturday.

Too soon to tell

Khurana however warned that it was "far too soon" to tell people they should take the drugs "strictly to lower the risk of cancer".

"We are not yet ready to recommend statins to those patients who do not have lipid abnormalities and the reason for that is they are not entirely safe," said Khurana. "They need to be monitored."

Statins neutralise an enzyme that regulates the production of chemical substances that play a role at a cellular level in the spread of cancer. Laboratory studies have shown that certain statins can provoke the natural death of these cells.

Researchers compared the use of statins among 556 women who developed breast cancer against 39 865 women that never suffered from the disease. The data was obtained from records between 1998 and 2004 of women cared for by the US Department of Veteran Affairs.

- AFP