Fish oil better than AstraZeneca's Crestor says new heart-failure study

01 September 2008

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.