Atorvastatin treatment does not abolish inflammatory mediated cardiovascular risk in subjects with chronic kidney disease

Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) are at increased risk of cardiovascular (CV) diseases. This may be due to a chronic inflammatory state in these patients. It is well established that statin treatment lowers cardiovascular risk and arterial inflammation in non-CKD subjects. Whether statin treatment is capable of decreasing inflammation caused by impaired renal function or not, isn’t clear yet. Renate M. Hoogeveen and colleagues conducted a study under the title “Atorvastatin treatment does not abolish inflammatory mediated cardiovascular risk in subjects with chronic kidney disease” published in the Nature Journal. The summary of this study is given below:

Objective:

To identify the extent of lowering inflammatory activity in CKD individuals through statin.

Method:

This is a single-center, open-label study that included 14 patients with CKD stage 3 or 4 without CVD. Arterial wall inflammation was assessed by 18F-fuoro-deoxyglucose positron emission tomography-computed tomography along with the phenotype of circulating monocytes after patients completed 12 weeks of one daily dose of atorvastatin 40 mg.

Findings:

The study reports that CKD-associated inflammatory activity is caused by factors beyond LDL-cholesterol, and is not decreased by statin treatment. Statin treatment failed to decrease arterial wall inflammation. Additionally, there is no change in chemokine receptor expression of circulating monocytes in subjects with mild to moderate CKD. The study encourages specific anti-inflammatory interventions to lower the inflammatory-driven CV risk in these subjects.

Limitation:

The duration of the intervention in the study with statins was limited. While only three participants were active smokers, there is a chance that smoking might influence the degree of arterial wall inflammation. Lastly, the sample size of the study was limited.

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