(Press-News.org) Taking a statin medication is an effective, safe, and low-cost way to lower cholesterol and reduce risk of cardiovascular events. Despite clinicians recommending that many patients with diabetes take statins, nearly one-fifth of them opt to delay treatment. In a new study, researchers from Mass General Brigham found that patients who started statin therapy right away reduced the rate of heart attack and stroke by one third compared to those who chose to delay taking the medication. The results, which can help guide decision-making conversations between clinicians and their patients, are published in the Journal of the American Heart Association
“I see patients with diabetes on a regular basis, and I recommend statin therapy to everyone who is eligible,” said senior author Alexander Turchin, MD, MS, of the Division of Endocrinology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. “Some people refuse because they want to first try lifestyle interventions or other drugs. But other interventions are not as effective at lowering cholesterol as starting statin therapy as soon as possible. Time is of the essence for your heart and brain health.”
Heart attacks and strokes remain the leading cause of complications and mortality for patients with diabetes. Statin therapy reduces risk of these cardiovascular events by preventing plaque buildup in the blood vessels, which, once accumulated, prevents delivery of oxygen and essential nutrients to the heart and brain.
The researchers used an artificial intelligence method called Natural Language Processing to gather data from the electronic health records of 7,239 patients at Mass General Brigham who ultimately started statin therapy during the nearly 20-year study period. The median patient age was 55, with 51% being women, 57% white, and the median HbA1c—a measure of blood sugar—being 6.9.
Nearly one-fifth (17.7%) of the patients in the study declined statin therapy when it was first recommended by their clinicians, then later accepted the therapy (after a median of 1.5 years) upon repeated recommendation by their clinician. Of those who delayed, 8.5% had a heart attack or stroke. But for patients who started statins immediately, the rate of those cardiovascular events was just 6.4%.
“Clinicians should recognize the increased cardiovascular risk associated with delaying statin therapy for patients with diabetes and use this information to guide shared decision-making conversations with their patients,” said Turchin.
Authorship: In addition to Turchin, Mass General Brigham authors include Zhou Lan. Other authors include Nisarg Shah, C. Justin Brown, and Seth S. Martin.
Disclosures: Martin reported personal consulting fees from Amgen, AstraZeneca, BMS, Chroma, Kaneka, Merck, New Amsterdam, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Premier, and Sanofi, as well as grant support from Merck. Turchin reported receiving grants from Eli Lilly and personal fees from Novo Nordisk and Proteomics International.
Funding: This study was funded in part by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (contract ME-2019C1-15328).
Paper cited: Shah, N et al. “Impact of Statin Non-Acceptance on Cardiovascular Outcomes in Patients with Diabetes” Journal of the American Heart Association DOI: 10.1161/JAHA.124.040464
###
About Mass General Brigham
Mass General Brigham is an integrated academic health care system, uniting great minds to solve the hardest problems in medicine for our communities and the world. Mass General Brigham connects a full continuum of care across a system of academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals, a health insurance plan, physician networks, community health centers, home care, and long-term care services. Mass General Brigham is a nonprofit organization committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community. In addition, Mass General Brigham is one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations with several Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals. For more information, please visit massgeneralbrigham.org.
END
Key takeaway:
The new University of Houston Cancer Immunotherapy Biomarker Core facility will accelerate biomarker discovery, improve immunotherapy targeting and expand research capacity across Texas — enhancing the state's competitiveness in cancer research and ultimately improving patient outcomes.
HOUSTON, May 27 -- As part of a $93 million grant package, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, known for funding groundbreaking projects, has awarded the University of Houston $3 million to set up a Cancer Immunotherapy Biomarker Core. This state-of-the-art facility will offer researchers in Texas ...
A joint team of researchers led by scientists at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) has reported the fastest quantum random number generator (QRNG) to date based on international benchmarks. The QRNG, which passed the required randomness tests of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, could produce random numbers at a rate nearly a thousand times faster than other QRNG.
“This is a significant leap for any industry that depends on strong data security,” said KAUST Professor Boon Ooi, who led the study, which is published in Optics Express. KAUST ...
CHICAGO, MAY 27, 2025 ― Christopher Flowers, M.D., division head of Cancer Medicine and chair of Lymphoma/Myeloma at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, will be honored with the Jamie Von Roenn Excellence in Teaching and Mentorship Award at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in recognition of his leadership and commitment to mentoring young oncology professionals.
The ASCO Special Awards are the organization’s highest honors and highlight ...
PULLMAN, Wash. -- When it comes to public attitudes toward using self-driving cars, understanding how the vehicles work is important—but so are less obvious characteristics like feelings of excitement or pleasure and a belief in technology’s social benefits.
Those are key insights of a new study from researchers at Washington State University, who are examining attitudes toward self-driving cars as the technology creeps toward the commercial market—and as questions persist about whether people will readily adopt them.
The study, published in the journal Transportation Research, ...
Students Pushing Innovation (SPIN) participant Mankeerat Singh Sidhu and National Center for Supercomputing Applications graduate student researcher Hetarth Chopra won first place in the 2025 Cozad New Venture Challenge for Tandemn, an innovative software solution designed to help democratize artificial intelligence computing resources.
Tandemn links idle graphics processing units (GPUs) into unified, high-performance networks designed for AI computing. The goal is to lower costs and barriers to GPU access while providing owners with possible users for their underutilized resources.
“While everyone talks about ‘democratizing ...
Can large language models (LLMs) reason by analogy? Some outputs suggest that they can, but it has been argued that these results reflect mimicry of the results of analogical reasoning in the models’ training data. To test this claim, LLM’s have been asked to solve counterfactual problems that are unlikely to be similar to problems in training data sets. Here is an example:
Let’s solve a puzzle problem involving the following fictional alphabet:
[x y l k w b f z t n j r q a h v g m u o p d i c s e]
Here is the ...
An experimental study suggests that people are less likely to behave in a trusting and cooperative manner when interacting with AI than when interacting with other humans. Scientists use experimental games to probe how humans make social decisions requiring both rational and moral thinking. Fabian Dvorak and colleagues compared how humans act in classic two-player games when playing with another human to how humans act when playing with a large-language model acting on behalf of another human. Participants played the Ultimatum ...
Locusts have undersized babies—with their first lunch already in their guts—in dry conditions. Desert locusts have two distinct modes—solitary and gregarious—that are behaviorally and visibly different. The insects also live in the Sahara desert, an environment with frequent dry conditions. Koutaro Ould Maeno and colleagues explored how a lack of moisture and the presence of other locusts shift reproductive resource allocation in the insects. In lab experiments, the authors raised locusts in crowds and in isolation. Crowd-reared females produced fewer, larger eggs than females raised in ...
Epidemics of infectious disease often come in waves, but the causes of these waves aren’t clear, frustrating efforts to predict or mitigate them. Are waves of infection caused by transmission seasonality, viral mutations, implementation of public health interventions, or something else? Claus Kadelka and colleagues model how human behavior, in response to information about disease risk, can create waves. There is frequently a lag between infection prevalence and the information about that prevalence reaching the public. Once ...
Public healthcare emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can drastically disrupt healthcare systems with long-term repercussions. The effects of such healthcare crises are more pronounced in the aging population, who are particularly vulnerable to chronic infections and sudden disruptions in healthcare.
The COVID-19 outbreak that emerged in December 2019 quickly spread worldwide, and several emergency measures were urgently implemented to curb its transmission. During the initial phase of the pandemic, stringent measures like social distancing, isolation, and mandatory wearing of masks were implemented. Unfortunately, ...
