The prescribing of lipid lowering drugs during a 1-year period: analysis of 7490 health insurance files.

A study of prescription patterns by office-based physicians was conducted to analyse the use of lipid lowering drugs (LLD) in a Germany area of 1,768,874 inhabitants during a 1-year period. The prescription database consisted of health insurance files from a random sampling of persons (n=7490) belonging to a large statutory health insurance organization during 1993-1994. During the study period LLD were prescribed to about 2.8% of the study population. Fibrates (43.7%) were the most frequently prescribed drugs followed by HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors (29.5%) and nicotinic acid with derivatives (21.7%). The prevalence of treatment rose with increasing age peaking among 60- to 69-year-olds (7.5%). More than two-thirds of the patients were not treated continuously, receiving LLD for less than 6 months. Thus, in patients being treated with LLD, the therapy seems to be ineffective due to the short episodes of drug administration. The presence of hyperlipidaemia plus additional risk factors such as hypertension led to a higher rate of LLD prescriptions than that for hyperlipidaemia alone. Only half of the patients with a history of previous myocardial infarction and hyperlipidaemia received LLD. Furthermore, patients with hyperlipidaemia and additional risk factors such as arterial hypertension, diabetes mellitus and coronary heart disease (CHD), in whom administration of LLD has often been shown to be effective, were by far too infrequently treated with these drugs. Copyright (c) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.