So What if Statins Increase Diabetes? The Real Risk May be Patient Non-Adherence

Just when we thought we had clarity on statin safety …

Last week’s leading health headline was a startling new finding that statin use increases the risk for diabetes mellitus (DM) in post-menopausal women by 50 percent, from six percent to nine percent.

While the data source -- the Women’s Health Initiative -- is an observational rather than a prospective study, the finding persists in a variety of patient subgroups, and even after the authors adjusted for baseline patient characteristics. This makes it unlikely that the increase in DM rate is due to women’s pre-statin risks of developing DM. Since diabetes is probably the single most important cardiac risk factor -- often considered the equivalent of a first MI in certain predictive models -- this news was both unsettling and perplexing. How might physicians and their patients interpret and act on this new information?

We were curious, so last week we conducted a small survey of full-time, office-based U.S. primary care physicians (PCPs) from the Epocrates physician panel* to test our hunches. Seven out of 10 PCPs had heard the recent mass media news coverage and, as a point of interest, two-thirds of them found the coverage “sensational” rather than “balanced/informative” -- despite the fact that clinicians interviewed on NBC Nightly News emphasized that they expected to keep their patients on statins.

Certainly, the news got patients’ attention. As of our survey date, at least one-third of PCP offices had received inquiries from statin patients. Balanced coverage or not, this sort of news event raises alarms, and it’s impossible for patients to draw implications on their own. What should patients, in fact, make of it?