Many patients not receiving statins after lower-extremity revascularization

A new study in JAMA Network Open analyzed data from more than 125,000 patients who received lower-extremity revascularization between 2014 and 2019.

Researchers found that rates of statin prescription at discharge increased overall, but only 30% of patients who did not have a prescription before their procedure were discharged with a new prescription.

The researchers focused on a cross-section of data from the Society of Vascular Surgery’s Vascular Quality Initiative, a large, multicenter national registry. The data included 172,025 procedures in 125,791 patients with a mean age of 67.7 years. Roughly 63% of patients represented in the data were men.

The study found that, generally, rates of statin prescriptions at discharge from this procedure grew from 75% in 2014 to 87% in 2019. When looking at patients not taking a statin prior to revascularization, the research team found that only 12,790 of 42,020 patients (30%) were newly discharged with a statin medication.