United States – Previous work also revealed that statin meds can reduce risks of liver cancer – now, research has shown that at least one other cholesterol medication can have the same effect.
Impact of Non-Statin Drugs
Katherine McGlynn of the U. S. National Cancer Institute sampled nearly 19,000 patients followed in the U.K.’s Clinical Practice Research Datalink, as reported by HealthDay.
Some 3,700 of them received treatment for liver cancer, and their medication was compared with nearly 15,000 similar patients not diagnosed with liver cancer.
Key Findings
McGlynn’s team associated the use of a non-statin form of cholesterol-lowering drugs known as cholesterol absorption inhibitors to reduce a third of the risk of liver cancer. These were released on July 29 in a journal called Cancer.
This link persisted even when other demographic characteristics and other clinical risk factors, such as diabetes and the status of liver disease, were taken into consideration by the researchers.
Statins Reaffirmed and Other Drugs Examined
The study also reestablish the fact that statins reduced the risk of liver cancer by 35%.
However, fibrates, omega-3 fatty acids and niacin – the three other cholesterol reducing drugs were not observed to have impacts on the onset of liver cancer as revealed by the study. The risks associated with another class of drugs, namely bile acid sequestrants, were uncertain, as reported by HealthDay.
Future Research and Implications
“As few studies have examined the effects of non-statin cholesterol-lowering drugs on liver cancer risk, the results of our study require replication in other populations,” McGlynn said in a journal news release. “If our findings are confirmed in other studies, however, our results may inform liver cancer prevention research.”