Short-term effects of atorvastatin on C-reactive protein

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Abstract
Aim To study the short-term effect of atorvastatin on C-reactive protein (CRP) in patients with or at risk for coronary heart disease. Methods and Results One hundred and fifty-five randomly selected patients from the SWiss Intervention Trial for lowering CHolesterol (SWITCH) were assessed for high sensitivity CRP, total cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol and triglycerides at baseline, and after 1 and 3 months of treatment with atorvastatin at various doses to reach pre-defined lipid target values. The median decrease of cholesterol was 28% after 1 month and 35% after 3 months. LDL-cholesterol was decreased by 37% and 45%, HDL-cholesterol was increased by 7% and 8%, respectively. Patients with a low CRP baseline concentration (lowest quartile −1) displayed no significant change, whereas patients in the other quartiles showed a significant decrease, of 22% to 40% (P -value Conclusion Atorvastatin significantly decreases CRP concentrations after 4 weeks of therapy. These results may be important with respect to the early benefit of statin therapy.

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