According to a study, the new cholesterol-lowering medication Nexletol provides an alternative to statins for people who cannot tolerate them.
Can't take statins? How "Nexletol," a novel medication, reduces cholesterol and staves against heart attacks
In a large experiment, those who have trouble taking
statins were given Nexletol, a different type of cholesterol-lowering drug,
which reduced their risk of heart attacks and a few other cardiovascular
problems.
In patients who cannot tolerate statins, a new cholesterol-lowering medication called Nexletol has been demonstrated to cut the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular issues.
The medication, also
known as bempedoic acid, blocks the liver's ability to produce cholesterol, but
it does so in a different way than statins, so it doesn't have the muscular
adverse effects that some statin users suffer.
The first-choice treatment for high cholesterol right now
is statins, but many patients cannot take them because of the negative effects.
These folks are classified as "highly needy patients" who are
"very difficult to treat" by Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland
Clinic, who conducted the study. For these patients, who previously had few
alternatives for decreasing their cholesterol, nexletol is being heralded as a
game-changer.
Around 14,000 individuals who could only tolerate a very
modest dose of a statin were followed throughout the course of the five-year
research. Daily Nexletol was administered to half of the subjects, while a
placebo was given to the other half. The key conclusion was that individuals
using Nexletol had a 13% decreased risk of a certain set of serious cardiac
issues. The medication also lowered the risk of heart attacks by 23% and the
requirement for artery-clearing treatments by 19%.
Although Dr. John H. Alexander of Duke University, who was
not involved in the study, finds the findings "compelling," he
advises against using Nexletol as a statin substitute just yet. The vast
majority of patients continue to prefer statins because of the overwhelming
data supporting their vascular advantages.
The research was financed by Esperion Therapeutics, the company that makes Nexletol, and it was released in the New England Journal of Medicine. Also, the findings were reported at an American College of Cardiology meeting. The study's authors anticipate that
