In a retrospective study published in PLoS ONE, researchers found a survival benefit associated with statin use in patients with small cell lung cancer (SCLC) that has spread to other regions of the body.
SCLC, although not as common as other forms of lung cancer, is an aggressive and often deadly disease; however, there has been little progress in uncovering new treatment approaches for the disease in recent years. Researchers, led by Zoltan Lohinai, MD, National Koranyi Institute of Pulmonology (Budapest, Hungary), evaluated 876 patients with stage 4 SCLC in a study to determine whether prolonged survival was associated with the use of any of the following therapies: aspirin, statins, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, α1-adrenergic receptor antagonists, and tricyclic antidepressants.
Statin therapy was the only medication studied that was associated with a statistically significant improvement in survival. Patients who took statins survived an average of 8.4 months, compared with 6.1 months in patients who took none of the medications studied. None of the other medications evaluated were associated with an improvement in survival.
Statins are a class of drugs used most often to lower cholesterol in at-risk patients in order to prevent cardiovascular events such as heart attack or stroke. The researchers noted that they were unable to determine whether improved survival associated with statin use resulted from a change in the behavior of the patients’ cancer or an improvement in the patients’ cardiovascular health.
Although intrigued by their findings, researchers were hesitant to endorse the clinical application of statins for SCLC patients due to the study’s limitations. Most notably, researchers were not able to verify participants’ medication compliance or duration of use. Additionally, statins were used more frequently during the later years of the study, which coincided with advances in oncology care that could have conferred a survival benefit.
Therefore, the team advised that their results be interpreted cautiously but advocated for further research to more definitely determine the benefits of the statin use in patients with SCLC.
