Statins Disappoint in COPD and ARDS

By Larry Husten

Two NHLBI studies have failed to find any benefit for statins in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Both trials were stopped early by their data and safety monitoring boards for futility. The results were presented at American Thoracic Society’s meeting and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Although the trials were negative, they needed to be performed, write editorialists. “We needed to bridge the gap between information gleaned by deduction from observation … and something gleaned from interventional experimentation… It would have been a big mistake to accept the findings without a test… Had we accepted the observational data at face value, we might have spent the cost of the trials many times over in useless treatments before recognizing our errors. That raises a hard question: With the advent of big data, which observational associations should we test in rigorous trials?”

Adapted from CardioExchange.