Adjunctive therapy with statins in schizophrenia patients: a meta-analysis and implications

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Highlights

•Adjunctive therapy with statins could improve psychiatric symptoms.
•Adjunctive therapy with simvastatin is correlated to the negative symptoms reduction.
•Psychiatric symptoms are changed by the duration of statins therapy.
•High dose simvastatin is prone to negative symptoms decrease.
•Compliant with antipsychotics of high P-gp affinity could improve psychiatric symptoms.

Abstract

There are some conflicting results regarding the benefit of adjunctive therapy with statins for severity of negative symptoms in schizophrenia. This study aimed to verify whether statins use for adjunctive therapy was indeed beneficial to improve psychiatric symptoms in schizophrenia. The data were from CENTRAL, PubMed, Embase and MEDLINE. The Boolean search term used for the electronic database search was (statin OR simvastatin OR atorvastatin OR fluvastatin OR lovastatin OR mevastatin OR pitavastatin OR pravastatin OR rosuvastatin OR cerivastatin) and (schizophrenia OR schizoaffective disorder OR psychosis). Inclusion criteria were the following: RCTs, the adult schizophrenia patients, received antipsychotics plus statins or placebo, and the PANSS or SANS scores. Exclusion criteria were as follows: no data reported and multiple reports of the same study. A meta-analysis was used to compare psychiatric symptoms in schizophrenia patients with or without statins adjunctive therapy. The 6 RCTs included in the analysis represented 339 participants (169 in treatment group versus 170 in placebo group). A test for overall effect demonstrated that the PANSS positive scale and negative scale significantly reduced in participants receiving compliant with statins. Our meta-analyses first clarified that adjunctive therapy with statins could improve psychiatric symptoms, either negative symptoms or positive symptoms.
Keywords:
statins, simvastatin, antipsychotics, schizophrenia, a meta-analysis

http://www.psy-journal.com/article/S0165-1781(17)31544-5/fulltext?rss=yes

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I don’t do too badly with schiz these days and I’m on crestor…rosubastatin for a couple of years now!

This is interesting! Can you decipher it for me? I have the attention span of a goldfish and that aint changing soon! haha…

thanks mate!

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I think what it basically says is that high dose Simvastatin used with antipsychotics significantly reduces positive and negative symptoms.

What i’m not sure about is the negative effects of high dose Simvastatin or other statins. I do know there is such a thing as statin induced myopathy especially with Simvastatin . I have an intermediate risk of such myopathy.