MONDAY, April 14 (HealthDay News) -- Two new studies describe
additional benefits of widely used measures aimed at preventing
cardiovascular disease: Cholesterol-lowering statins also reduce
blood pressure, and the DASH diet for blood pressure control lowers
the incidence of heart disease and stroke in middle-aged women.
The statin study wasn't intended to measure the effect of the
drugs on blood pressure, said Dr. Beatrice Golomb, an associate
professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego.
It was a classic double-blind, controlled trial with some of the
973 participants taking either simvastatin (Zocor) or pravastatin
(Pravachol), and others taking a placebo. Neither doctors nor the
participants knew who was taking what.
"But we got enough titillating information that we asked for
permission to break the blind, and we looked at blood pressure
before any other endpoint," Golomb said.
The blood pressure benefit was there, with systolic pressure
(the top number) lower by an average of 2.2 milligrams of mercury
for those taking a statin, and diastolic pressure (the bottom
number) 2.4 milligrams lower. The reductions were about the same
for both statins.
It's not a big drop, Golomb said, but "there are lots of studies
showing that on a population basis, a few millimeters of reduction
has a big effect on cardiac endpoints."
Golomb said she wouldn't put anyone on a statin expressly for
blood pressure reduction, but "some people might be spared the need
for a blood pressure medication when they are put on a statin for
cholesterol reduction," she said.
The results, published in the April 14 issue of
Archives of Internal Medicine, help to explain why treatment
with statins has been associated with a reduction in the risk of
stroke that couldn't be attributed to the drugs' effect on blood
cholesterol, she said.
The DASH -- Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension -- study,
reported in the same issue of
Archives of Internal Medicine, is the first to look at the
diet's effect on the incidence of heart disease and stroke, said
study author Teresa T. Fung, an associate professor of nutrition at
the Simmons College School for Health Studies in Boston.
"Previously, the benefits that were reported were for
hypertension [high blood pressure]," Fung said. "No previous study
looked at cardiovascular endpoints such as heart disease and
stroke."
The study reported on 88,517 female nurses aged 34 to 59 who
started with no evidence of cardiovascular disease or diabetes in
1980. In the 24 years that followed, the one-fifth of women in the
group whose diets were most similar to that recommended in DASH --
low in animal protein, moderate in low-fat dairy products and high
in plant proteins -- were 24 percent less likely to develop
coronary heart disease and 18 percent less likely to have a stroke
than the one-fifth of women with the lowest DASH scores.
While the study was not the kind of carefully controlled trial
that gets the highest regard in research, it carries a message,
Fung said. "This report actually shows that those people whose diet
resembles the DASH diet reduce the risk of actual cardiovascular
disease," she said.
More information
You can learn more about statins from the
American Heart Association, and the DASH diet
from the
U.S. Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
