Should statin guidelines consider patient preferences? Eliciting preferences of benefit and harm outcomes of statins for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease in the sub-Saharan African and European contexts

BACKGROUND: Patient preferences are key parameters to evaluate benefit-harm balance of statins for primary prevention but they are not readily available to guideline developers and decision makers. Our study aimed to elicit patient preferences for benefit and harm outcomes related to use of statins for primary cardiovascular disease prevention and to examine how the preferences differ across economically and socio–culturally different environments. METHODS: We conducted preference-eliciting surveys using best-worst scaling designed with a balanced incomplete-block design (BIBD) on 13 statins-related outcomes on 220 people in Ethiopia and Switzerland. The participants made tradeoff decisions and selected the most and least worrisome outcomes concurrently from each scenario generated using the BIBD. The design yielded 34,320 implied paired-comparisons and 2860 paired-responses as unit of analysis for eliciting the preferences that were analyzed using a conditional-logit model on a relative scale and surface under the cumulative ranking curve from multivariate random-effects meta-analysis model on a scale of 0 to 1. RESULTS: There was high internal consistency of responses and minimal amount of measurement error in both surveys. Severe stroke was the most worrisome outcome with a ceiling preference of 1 (on 0 to 1 scale) followed by severe myocardial infarction, 0.913 (95% CI, 0.889–0.943), and cancer, 0.846 (0.829–0.855); while treatment discontinuation, 0.090 (0.023–0.123), and nausea/headache, 0.060 (0.034–0.094) were the least worrisome outcomes. Preferences were similar between Ethiopia and Switzerland with overlapping uncertainty intervals and concordance correlation of 0.97 (0.90–0.99). CONCLUSIONS: Our study provides much needed empirical evidence on preferences that help clinical guidelines consider for weighing the benefit and harm outcomes when recommending for or against statins for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease. The preferences are consistent across the disparate settings; however, we recommend inclusion of more countries in future studies to ensure the generalizability of the preferences to all environments. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12872-018-0838-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.