National guidelines recommend cholesterol-lowering treatment on the basis of an individual patient's cholesterol levels and risk factors for heart disease. However, using drugs to lower cholesterol levels is expensive. It is unclear for which types of patients this cost is worth the benefit.
Statins are the major type of medicines used to lower cholesterol levels.
The authors divided the virtual patients into 240 separate groups according to various combinations of cholesterol level and other risk factors. They used information from actual patients to estimate what might happen when each group of patients was treated with diet alone, received statin drugs, or received no cholesterol-lowering treatment. The QALYs take into account how well people are during those years. Compared with no treatment, the costs of diet alone seemed nearly always worth the benefit, except perhaps for women 35 to 44 years of age who had no risk factors. This study was a computer simulation.