Primary prevention with statins and incident diabetes in hypertensive patients at high cardiovascular risk

Background and aimsThe ESC/ESH guidelines for arterial hypertension recommend using statins for patients with high cardiovascular (CV) risk for both secondary and primary prevention. A recent meta-analysis, combining previous studies on statins, concluded that they are associated with a 9% increased risk of incident type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM). There is no information on whether statins increase incidence of DM in primary prevention.Method and resultsWe evaluated risk of incident DM in relation to statin prescription in 4750 hypertensive, non-diabetic outpatients (age 58.57 ± 9.0 yrs, 42.3% women), from the CampaniaSalute Network, without chronic kidney disease more than grade 3, free of prevalent CV disease and with at least 12 months of follow-up. DM was defined according to ADA criteria. At the end of follow-up period (55.78 ± 42.5 months), 676 patients (14%) were on statins. These patients were older (62.54 ± 7.3 vs 57.91 ± 9.1 yrs; p < 0.0001), more often female (49% vs 41.2%; p = 0.0001), with higher initial total cholesterol (217.93 ± 44.3 vs 205.29 ± 36.6 mg/dl), non-HDL cholesterol (167.16 ± 44.5 vs 155.18 ± 36.7 mg/dl) and triglycerides (150.69 ± 85.2 vs 130.98 ± 72.0 mg/dl; all p < 0.0001) than patients no taking statins, without other differences in clinical and laboratory characteristics. At the end of follow-up, prevalence of DM was 18.1% among patients on statins and 7.2% among those without lipid-lowering therapy (p < 0.0001). However, incident DM was 10.2% in patients on statins and 8.7% in those free of statin therapy (NS).ConclusionIn real-life outpatient environment, statin prescription for primary prevention is not associated with increased risk of incident DM.Clinical trial registration identifier: NCT01077037.