Statin Therapy Does not Seem to Benefit Giant Cell Arteritis
Section snippets
Patients and Methods
We conducted a retrospective follow-up study in 121 patients with GCA diagnosed by the Department of Rheumatology within the Hospital Universitario de Bellvitge (Barcelona, Spain) from January 1986 until December 2004. The diagnosis of GCA was made according to the 1990 ACR criteria for the classification of GCA (18), as follows: (1) age at disease onset ≥50 years; (2) new onset of headache; (3) temporal artery abnormality on examination (decreased pulses unrelated to arteriosclerosis, nodules,
Results
The series included 84 women and 37 men (ratio 2.2) with a mean age at time of diagnosis of 74 ± 7 years (range, 56 to 89). The mean duration of symptoms before the diagnosis was 3.2 months. TAB was positive in 88 (73%) patients. The main clinical features and laboratory data of the study cohort are summarized in Table 1. Information about the clinical characteristics of most of these patients has been extensively reported elsewhere (19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25).
At the time of the GCA diagnosis,
Discussion
Inhibitors of 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase or statins constitute the most powerful class of lipid lowering drugs, widely used in medical practice. During the past several years, additional actions of statins unrelated to cholesterol reduction have been identified that include antiinflammatory and immunomodulatory properties (12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17). Statins effectively repress major histocompatibility complex class II antigen expression induced by IFN-γ in a variety of cells
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Javier Narváez and Berta Bernad contributed equally to this work.