Tag: aspirin

Posted on

Statins fail again

Statins have a tortured relationship with nephrology. Our patients have accelerated atherosclerosis and they die overwhelmingly of cardiovascular disease. So one of my primary jobs is to continually optimize cardiovascular risk factors to save my patients

Control blood pressure, start an aspirin, and maximize the statin are the lather, rinse, repeat of my world.

That said we have little data that this makes a whit of difference, at least in our dialysis patients.

Aspirin

  • No randomized trials have been done on the role of aspirin to prevent cardiovascular events among dialysis patients.
  • Aspirin was found to increase acute coronary syndrome in an unbadjusted analysis but was not significant in multivariate analysis.
  • Berger et al. (PDF), however found a dramatic reduction in 30-day mortality for patients with acute myocardial infarction given aspirin. Unfortunatly fewer dialysis patients received ASA and other standards of heart-attack care (beta-blocker and ACEi) than patients not on dialysis.
The survival of patients based on whether they received ASA for their acute MIThe use of standard therapies for acute myocardial infarction was lower among dialysis patients, even patients deemed ideal candidates for the therapy.


Blood pressure

  • Hypertension, along with cholesterol and obesity, is subject to reverse epidemiology in dialysis patients. This means that observed epidemiology trends are the opposite of what you would expect from data on non-dialysis patients. Lower blood pressure leads to high mortality, lower cholesterol leads to higher mortality, increased BMI yields better observed survival. The observational data, however, does not mean that interventions to lower blood pressure will lead to the same bad outcomes.
  • A recent meta-analysis (PDF) of 8 randomized trials of anti-hypertensive therapy gives credence to the practice of treating hypertension in dialysis patients.

  • One thing high lighted by the trial, though, is the paucity of evidence for this treatment: They were able to find only 1,679 patients. Terrible.

Statins

  • The 4D study is one of the few randomized controlled trials in dialysis patients and unfortunately did not show any improvement in mortality with atorvastatin. The study randomized 1,255 hemodialysis patients to either 20 mg of atorvastatin or placebo. After 4 years they found the statin was safe and effective in reducing the median serum LDL cholesterol level by 42%. However, the primary endpoint—cardiac death, nonfatal MI, and stroke—was reduced by insignificant 8% (P=0.37).

  • The authors found a significant increase in fatal strokes among the patients randomized to atorvastatin. (RR 2.03, P=0.04).
  • Today came word that another randomized controlled trial on statins among hemodialysis patients, AURORA, was also a bust. Published yesterday in The Journal, AURORA randomized 2,776 dialysis patients to 10 mg of rosuvastatin (Crestor) or matching placebo. The end-point was a composite of CV death, non-fatal MI, and non-fatal stroke. Average follow-up was 3.8 years and there was no difference in the primary outcome (396 outcomes with rosuvastatin versus 408 on placebo, P=0.51).

  • AURORA found no increased risk of strokes as found in the 4D study.
Posted on

Journal Club: Aspirin and FGF-23

The first article was an intriguing look at various renal function parameters and how they respond to various doses of aspirin. All the patients were pre-treated with enalepril and a thiazide diuretic for 6 days. Then they were given one of four doses of aspirin:

  1. placebo
  2. 80 mg
  3. 160 mg
  4. 320 mg

They found decreased GFR, decreased sodium clearance, decreased solute clearance and decreased free water clearance with 160 mg and 320 mg but the effect was transient with all factors returning to baseline 4 hours after the aspirin was administered.

The article has a long introduction and discussion outlining all of the heart failure studies which have shown that aspirin can be harmful or can decrease the effectiveness of ACEi in heart failure.

The study is small (n=16, with each participant randomized to two doses of aspirin with a 2 week washout between doses) and the authors fail to fully describe the cohort. The primary weakness is the authors want to extrapolate there findings over 6 hours to the effect of aspirin taken chronically for years. Additionally they make the leap of using aspirin-induced changes in renal function to be a proxy for interference with ACEi effect on heart failure survival.

Nonetheless it will change the way I practice. I had previously given my patients (who essentially all are on diuretics and ACEi) the green light to take aspirin any way they want. I will now suggest they limit themselves to 81 mg for CAD protection.

The second article was the NEJM article on FGF-23 and the risk of mortality in hemodialysis patients. FGF-23, or fibroblast growth factor-23, is a newly discovered molecule which regulates the phosphorous in the body. It is one of the primary phosphatonins, signals which increase the renal excretion of phosphorous. Additionally they suppress 1-alpha hydroxylase lowering the amount of 1,25 dihydroxy-vitamin D.

This is prospective cohort with nested case-control of incident dialysis patients in the U.S. The investigators looked at 200 patients who died (cases) in the first year and compared them to 200 patients who survived one year (control). FGF-23 was measured on the first day of dialysis. They divided the cohort into quartiles based on phosphorous and found that patients who subsequently died had increased FGF-23. They found a graded increase in the risk of death with increased FGF-23 level that was signifigant in the whole cohort and inevery quartile of phosphorous except the highest.They also showed a dose responce of mortality to FGF-23 levels in the whole cohort in the crude data, case-mix adjusted and multivariate adjusted.


The authors in the discussion point out that the association of FGF-23 with mortality is stronger than that found with phosphorous and mortality. They found FGF-23 levels were 22% lower in African-Americans than in Caucasians. The authors leave a tease that this lower level of FGF-23 level may explain the improved survival found in African Americans on dialysis.