Population Impact & Efficiency of Benefit-Targeted Versus Risk-Targeted Statin Prescribing for Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease.

Background: Benefit-targeted statin prescribing may be superior to risk-targeted statin prescribing (the current standard), but the impact and efficiency of this approach are unclear.

Methods And Results: We analyzed the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) using an open-source model (the Prevention Impact and Efficiency Model) to compare targeting of statin therapy according to expected benefit (benefit-targeted) versus baseline risk (risk-targeted) in terms of projected population-level impact and efficiency. Impact was defined as relative % reduction in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease in the US population for the given strategy compared to current statin treatment patterns; and efficiency as the number needed to treat over 10 years (NNT, average and maximum) to prevent each atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease event. Benefit-targeted moderate-intensity statin therapy at a treatment threshold of 2.3% expected 10-year absolute risk reduction could produce a 5.7% impact (95% confidence interval, 4.8-6.7). This is approximately equivalent to the potential impact of risk-targeted therapy at a treatment threshold of 5% 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk (5.6% impact [4.7-6.6]). Whereas the estimated maximum NNT is much improved for benefit-targeted versus risk-targeted therapy at these equivalent-impact thresholds (43.5 vs 180), the average NNT is nearly equivalent (24.2 vs 24.6). Reaching 10% impact (half the Healthy People 2020 impact objective, loosely defined) is theoretically possible with benefit-targeted moderate-intensity statins of persons with expected absolute risk reduction >2.3% if we expand age eligibility and account for treatment of all persons with diabetes mellitus or with low-density lipoprotein >190 mg/dL (impact=12.4%; average NNT=23.0).

Conclusions: Benefit-based targeting of statin therapy provides modest gains in efficiency over risk-based prescribing and could theoretically help attain approximately half of the Healthy People 2020 impact goal with reasonable efficiency.