New Statin Use and Mortality in Older Veterans —Reply

In Reply Dr Whittle and Ms Digitale and Dr Newman raise concerns about the plausibility of our findings indicating a lower risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in older veterans who newly used statins, which has not been clearly demonstrated previously. Randomized trials have been conducted mostly in patients younger than 75 years. Until randomized clinical trials are completed in older adults, the magnitude of statin benefits or harms in this population will not be known. Our study was based on observational data, and therefore we cannot exclude unmeasured or residual confounding and other types of biases as partial or total explanation of the findings, despite the use of propensity score overlap weighting to minimize bias.
Source: JAMA - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research