Papel de la atorvastatina en la prevención del ictus. ¿Puede estar relacionado con su acción sobre la activación plaquetaria? Consideraciones basadas en nuestra propia experiencia

It is well known that arterial hypertension is the main stroke risk factor and hypertensive patients frequently have other vascular risk factors, such as high platelet activation. Our work group has reported that some hypotensive drugs not only normalize blood pressure values but decrease platelet hyperactivity, which is supposed to be an added beneficial factor as the platelets play an important role in atherothrombotic process. Currently, it has not been clearly established if hypercholesterolemia plays a role in stroke. However, many authors have demonstrated that administration of statins, a potent drug used in the hypercholesterolemia treatment, produces a significant reduction in the stroke incidents. This observation is attributed to different statin pleiotropic effects. Since our group has described the normalization of the platelet activation with atorvastatin, it seems reasonable to think that statins decrease stroke incidents due to their effect on platelet hyperactivation. However, the confirmation of the possible mechanism action requires a more extensive clinical study.