Masatoshi Fujita    Tsutomu Yamazaki    Doubun Hayashi  Takahide Kohro    Yoshihiro Okada    Ryozo Nagai   
Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine， Kyoto，    University of Tokyo， Tokyo， Japan. 

We analyzed 6317 patients with a baseline LDL-cholesterol level of 70 to 130 mg/dL among 13 812 patients of the Japanese Coronary Artery Disease (JCAD) study. We divided the patients into 2 groups according to statin treatment and its lipophilicity. We compared the incidence of all-cause events between 2000 statin-treated patients and 4317 patients without statins during a median follow-up period of 1092 days (range 0 to 1676 days). After propensity score matching (n=1641， for each group)， Kaplan-Meier analysis showed 25% reduction in the incidence of all-cause events with statin treatment (P=0.0016) (Fig.1). The incidence of all-cause events was also compared between 1139 patients with hydrophilic statin and 861 patients with lipophilic statin(Fig.2). After propensity score matching (n=778， for each group)， Kaplan-Meier analysis showed no significant difference in the incidence of all-cause events with respect to lipophilicity. Subgroup analysis of the JCAD suggested a lipid-independent beneficial treatment effect of statins on all-cause events， and these favorable effects were comparable between the hydrophilic and lipophilic statins.

Fig. 1. Cumulative hazard of all cardiovascular events in patients with and without statin treatment after propensity score matching.

Fig. 2. Cumulative hazard of all cardiovascular events in patients treated with lipophilic or hydrophilic statin after propensity score matching.