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Discontinuing Statin-doses after stroke may raise death risk: Experts

increased risk of death in patients who stop using

If you have survived a stroke and a patient with high cholesterol levels, don’t make a mistake of discontinuing your cholesterol-lowering drugs – it may create havoc to your health. The link between stroke and cholesterol drug may have left you pondering – but the fact is that patients who stop taking cholesterol-lowering drugs within a year of surviving a stroke have been found to have a two-fold increased risk of ‘death’!

Although, the cholesterol-lowering pharmaceutical agent – Statin – may cause changes in liver function and damage muscle tissue very seriously, not taking it after a stroke may prove more fatal, as per the researchers’ claim.

Statins can prove beneficial to patients who have suffered a stroke caused by a clot, i.e ischemic stroke, but, it is unfortunate that stroke survivors often tend to stop taking their cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Senior author Carlo Caltagirone, M.D., Scientific Director of Santa Lucia Foundation said,

Because medication costs are covered by the Italian National Health Service, except for a small co-pay, cost cannot be related to these patients discontinuing their prescribed therapy.

In these studies the specific reasons for discontinuation are usually unknown, and they are difficult to analyze. However, contributing factors are probably related to patients’ and their healthcare providers’ behavior and beliefs, and probably also to features of the healthcare system itself.

Besides increasing stroke severity at the time of hospital admission, discontinuing antiplatelet drugs can also increase death risk by 80 percent!

Thus, in the first year after a stroke, a patient should not compromise with his health and risk his life by discontinuation statin. You can do that gradually with the increase in time, if you actually need to.

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