A study has found AstraZeneca Plc's cholesterol drug Crestor to have failed a second clinical trial for heart failure.

The finding suggests that such statin medicines do not significantly improve survival in patients with a chronic condition.

The latest GISSI-HF study covered 4,500 patients, tracking them for an average of 3.9 years, and found that 29 per cent people taking Crestor died from any cause, as against 28 per cent of those given a placebo. The findings were revealed at the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology during the weekend, in Munich, Germany.

The research blows a hole in hopes that AstraZeneca's Crestor, an effective drug for treating high levels of "harmful" LDL cholesterol, could be the first statin to improve survival in heart failure.

Heart failure is a hard-to-treat condition, as the weakened condition of the heart means that it cannot pump blood effectively. Consequentally, it causes shortness of breath and other ailments. CORONA, a prior study done last November, had also not shown any proven benefits from adding Crestor to existing prescriptions of heart failure patients.

The GISSI-HF study is said to be even less encouraging than the CORONA trial, as the earlier study had shown at least a modest reduction in the number of people admitted to hospital for cardiovascular incidents among patients using Crestor. No such differences were found in GISSI-HF study.

Crestor is a five-year-old product, with sales totalling around $1.7 billion during the first two quarters of the year. This number was projected by some analysts to boom to $5.2 billion by 2010, by which time Crestor would make up around 15 per cent of the group's sales.

Fish Oil better for combating heart failure
Reserachers now say that fish oil capsules are a better bet in preventing hospital admissions and death of heart failure patients.

Italian researchers at the European Society of Cardiology conference said that GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Pronova BioPharma ASA's Lovaza capsules lowered a heart failure patients' risk of dying from the ailment by nine per cent, and brought down the risk of hospitalisation by eight per cent.Heartr failure is a life-long condition where the heart is not capable of pumping adequate supplies of blood to keep up with the body's needs.
Though doctors treat the disorder with a number of medicines, they are also seeking ways to improve their patients' health.

Other smaller studies have shown that fish oil could possibly have a calming effect on irregular heart rhythms. That study followed around 6,975 patients diagnosed with chronic heart failure who were either given one gram of fish oil every day, or a dummy pill.

Doctors tracked patients for a mean of 3.9 years, and found that patients who exactly followed the treatment regime reduced their risk of death by 14 per cent. Fish oil contains omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, which the researchers say makes the heart beat more rhythmically, leading to moderate benefits. Researchers are now calling this fish oil finding important, as it well supplements medication in the treatment of the heart condition.

The study, while disproving AstraZeneca's Crestor, could provide a boost to the sales of GlaxoSmithKline and Lysaker, and Pronova BioPharma's Lovaza.

Glaxo also has the rights to the treatment in the US, and some analysts estimate that Lovaza will have US only sales of around $887 million by 2010.

Researchers also said that while there is some evidence of including fish in the diet as being of help those with cardiovascular disease, it isn't yet entirely clear whether such dietary choices would impact heart failure. They caution that a daily dose of one gram of fish oil would be difficult to achieve by diet alone.