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Diabetologists most likely to prescribe statins for patients with diabetes in India
The numbers of prescriptions for statins for people with type 2 diabetes differ in India depending on the type of care the patient is receiving.
Rajeev Gupta, MD, PhD, of the departments of preventive cardiology, internal medicine and endocrinology, Eternal Heart Care Centre and Research Institute at Mount Sinai New York Affiliate in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, and colleagues evaluated prescriptions data from 8,699 patients with type 2 diabetes being treated at nine different sites in India to determine the extent of statin prescriptions and their types.
Participants were divided into groups based on their level of care: treatment by internists (26.5%), treatment by diabetologists (37.9%) and treatment by endocrinologists (35.6%).
In the entire cohort, 51% had hypertension, 34.9% had total cholesterol 200 mg/dL or higher, 50% had LDL cholesterol 100 mg/dL or higher, 35.2% had triglycerides 150 mg/dL or higher, and 48.9% had low HDL cholesterol.
Statins were prescribed for 55.2% of participants, and the rate was greater among men (57.2%) compared with women (52.1%; P < .001).
Of provider specialty groups, 66.4% of diabetologists prescribed statins, followed by 53.3% of internists and 46.8% of endocrinologists (P < .001).
Participants aged 60 years or older were the most likely to be prescribed statins (62.2%), followed by those aged 50 to 59 years (60.1%), those aged 40 to 49 years (49.7%) and those younger than 40 years (49.7%). High-risk participants were more likely to be prescribed statins (58%) compared with medium-risk participants (53.8%) and low-risk participants (56.8%; P < .001).
Moderate-dose statins were the most often prescribed (85.4%), followed by high-dose statins (12.7%) and low-dose statins (1.9%).
“This study shows that prescriptions of statins in clinic-based patients with type 2 diabetes in India are suboptimal,” the researchers wrote. “Efforts to increase use of these drugs to all patients with diabetes to prevent [CV] complications are urgently required. These results are all the more important after the publication of the HOPE-3 study where statin use has been associated with a significant decrease in CV mortality and acute events in intermediate-risk patients, including those with diabetes. Strategies to optimize prescriptions are better clinician awareness of guidelines and continuing medical education as well as periodic prescription audits and dissemination of results to improve quality of preventive care among patients with type 2 diabetes.” – by Amber Cox
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.