Background:
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality in the United States. Approximately 25% of total deaths in the United States are attributed to cardiovascular diseases. Modification of risk factors has been shown to reduce mortality and morbidity in people with coronary artery disease. Medications such as statins are well known for reducing risks and recent data has shown that statins are beneficial in the primary prevention of coronary artery disease. The purpose of this study is to assess whether statins are being prescribed on discharge to patients who are identified as intermediate to high risk using the ACC/AHA Pooled Cohort Equations.
Methodology:
We reviewed and analyzed the charts of hospitalized patient’s ages 40 to 79 years who were discharged under the service of Internal Medicine at Richmond University Medical Center from September 2018 to August 2019. Exclusion criteria included: patients that expired before discharge or were admitted to the intensive or coronary care units, pregnancy, previous diagnosis of coronary/peripheral artery disease or stroke, already on statins or lipid-lowering medications, allergic to statins, discharged on statins for coronary/peripheral artery disease or stroke, and patients with liver disease or elevated liver enzymes. We used the ACC/AHA Pooled Cohort Equations risk to calculate the 10-year coronary artery disease risk for each patient.
Results:
The 10-year risk is grouped as low risk (<5%), borderline risk (5% to 7.4%), intermediate risk (7.5% to 19.9%) and high risk (≥20%). Among 898 patients, 10% had intermediate and high risk that were not discharged with statins. Among the 10%, about 6.6% were intermediate risk and 3.4% were high risk.
Conclusions:
A significant number of intermediate and high-risk patients were discharged without statins, although a CT coronary calcium may be helpful in further classifying the risk in some of them. We believe that a lipid profile should be checked in all hospitalized patients 40 years and older in order to calculate their atherosclerosis cardiovascular disease risk score and to possibly initiate statins after discussing the benefits and side effects, particularly in the intermediate risk group. The continuation of statins would be followed up by their primary care physicians. We plan to liaise with the information technology department in our facility to provide a link to the risk calculator in the electronic medical record so that the risk can be calculated and statins initiated as necessary. We will conduct a follow up review to assess for effectiveness.