Impact of long-term lipid-lowering therapy on clinical outcomes in breast cancer

Introduction The use of statins has been associated with improved survival in patients with breast cancer in several studies but results have been mixed. This study evaluates the impact of duration of statin use on breast cancer patient outcomes. Methods This is a single-institution, retrospective cohort, examining the impact of statin use on the outcomes of 1523 women diagnosed with operable breast cancer between1995 and 2015. Clinical variables were compared using Student’s t test, Fisher’s exact and Chi square tests. Overall (OS) and disease-free (DFS) survival were performed using Kaplan–Meier and Cox-Proportional Hazard (Cox-PH) analysis in the statistical software R . Results Patients were grouped by duration of statin use: never-statin user [N] ( n = 1092), short ( 5 years) ( n = 207) term. Over a median follow-up of 70.2 months, 138 women died (84 died of breast cancer) and 125 had disease recurrence. On multivariable Cox-PH analysis adjusting for clinical variables including metabolic comorbidities using the Charlson comorbidity index, OS in the [S] and [M] subgroups did not differ [N], while OS was improved in [L] (adjusted hazard ratio (AHR) 0.38, confidence interval (CI) 0.17–0.85, p