Statins can be stopped toward the end of life

By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) – - Taking people off cholesterol-lowering medications near the end of life is safe and may actually be beneficial, according to a new study. Among people without active heart disease who were expected to live no more than a year, stopping the drugs, known as statins, didn’t increase the number of deaths within 60 days, but did improve quality of life. “We start a lot of medicines, and many of these medicines come with the tagline that ‘you’ll be taking these medicines for the rest of your life,’” said Dr. Amy Abernethy, the study’s senior author from the Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina. The researchers write in JAMA Internal Medicine that drug trials rarely address the issue of when to stop using the treatments. March 23, 2015 at 07:46PM

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