Associations among statins, preventive care, and prostate cancer mortality

Background Increasing evidence indicates an association between statins and reduced prostate cancer-specific mortality (PCSM). However, significant bias may exist in these studies. One particularly challenging bias to assess is the healthy user effect, which may be quantified by screening patterns....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Prostate cancer and prostatic diseases 2020-09, Vol.23 (3), p.475-485
Main Authors: Kumar, Abhishek, Riviere, Paul, Luterstein, Elaine, Nalawade, Vinit, Vitzthum, Lucas, Sarkar, Reith R., Bryant, Alex K., Einck, John P., Mundt, Arno J., Murphy, James D., Rose, Brent S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
692/308/409
692/699/67/589/466
Antigens
Bias
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Cancer Research
Cholesterol
Comorbidity
Diagnosis
Evaluation
Informatics
Medical screening
Mortality
Patient outcomes
Preventive medicine
Prostate cancer
Prostate-specific antigen
Regression analysis
Regression models
Statins
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Summary:Background Increasing evidence indicates an association between statins and reduced prostate cancer-specific mortality (PCSM). However, significant bias may exist in these studies. One particularly challenging bias to assess is the healthy user effect, which may be quantified by screening patterns. We aimed to evaluate the association between statin use, screening, and PCSM in a dataset with detailed longitudinal information. Methods We used the Veterans Affairs Informatics and Computing Infrastructure to assemble a cohort of patients diagnosed with prostate cancer (PC) between 2000 and 2015. We collected patient-level demographic, comorbidity, and tumor data. We also assessed markers of preventive care utilization including cholesterol and prostate specific antigen (PSA) screening rates. Patients were considered prediagnosis statin users if they had at least one prescription one or more years prior to PC diagnosis. We evaluated PCSM using hierarchical Fine-Gray regression models and all-cause mortality (ACM) using a cox regression model. Results The final cohort contained 68,432 men including 40,772 (59.6%) prediagnosis statin users and 27,660 (40.4%) nonusers. Prediagnosis statin users had higher screening rates than nonusers for cholesterol (90 vs. 69%, p  
ISSN:1365-7852
1476-5608
DOI:10.1038/s41391-020-0207-5