TUESDAY, Aug. 3, 2021 (HealthDay News) — For women with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), statin use after diagnosis is associated with improved survival, according to a study published online Aug. 3 in Cancer.
Malgorzata K. Nowakowska, from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and colleagues examined the clinical effect of incident statin use among women aged 66 years and older with stage I to III breast cancer using Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results-Medicare and Texas Cancer Registry-Medicare data. The authors examined the association between new statin use in the 12 months following breast cancer diagnosis and overall survival (OS) and breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS).
Among 1,534 patients with TNBC, the researchers observed a significant association between statin use and increased BCSS (standardized hazard ratio, 0.42) and OS (hazard ratio, 0.70). Among the 15,979 patients without TNBC, there was no association for statin use with BCSS or OS. When examining statin exposure as a time-varying variable, the results were consistent.
“Our results extend previous work supporting the association between statin therapy and improved outcomes in patients with breast cancer and specifically add weight to the strong preclinical evidence for a benefit of statin therapy in patients with aggressive breast cancer subtypes,” the authors write. “Our data suggest that statins may have a role as a therapy in patients with TNBC and support the initiation of prospective studies.”
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