Statin therapy now more common than steroids in clinical practice

Response to: ‘Statin therapy now more common than steroids in clinical practice’ by Pareek and Chankurdar

“…To conclude, despite the DM risk increase with statins and treatment duration concern pointed out by Pareek and Chankurdar,1 we believe that statins exert beneficial cardiovascular effects with more complex interactions in patients with RA than in the general population. We hope to elucidate the net risk/benefit ratio of statins in our ongoing research on statins in additional RA cohorts.…”

“…We appreciate the interest shown by Pareek and Chankurdar1 concerning our recent study on diabetes mellitus (DM) risk associated with disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs and statins in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) 2. They pointed out that statin-associated DM risk in patients with RA might be a more important concern than the risk attributed to glucocorticoids (GCs) due to longer treatment durations 1…”

“…Pareek and Chankurdar1 also highlight that concomitant hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) use with statins or GCs might attenuate the DM risk increase associated with both medications. This therapeutic advantage of HCQ was also demonstrated in our study2 (see table 1) as shown by Pareek et al 9 for statins, despite the differences in patient characteristics, statin and HCQ doses and durations.…”