Effect of Intensive and Standard Lipid-Lowering Therapy on the Progression of Stroke in Patients With Coronary Artery Syndromes: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

This meta-analysis demonstrated the effect of intensive versus standard statins on the risk of stroke in patients with coronary artery syndromes (CAS). PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane library, and clinicaltrials.gov were searched, and the retrieved studies were undertaken for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) throughout September 2018. Studies that were designed as RCTs and recruited at least 1000 CAS patients followed up greater than 1 year were eligible for this study. The summary relative risk with the 95% confidence interval was used as an effect estimate and calculated using the random-effects model. Five RCTs comprising a total of 39,612 coronary syndrome patients with reported 1236 stroke events were included in this meta-analysis. The summary result indicated a 14% reduction in the risk of stroke in CAS patients receiving intensive statin therapy as compared to standard statin therapy. The significant differences mainly occurred in mean age ≥60 years (P = 0.007), percentage of males ≥80% (P = 0.011), percentage diabetes mellitus ≥ 15% (P = 0.018), percentage hypertension ≥50% (P = 0.030), percentage of current smokers <30% (P = 0.011), percentage of prior myocardial infarction ≥50% (P = 0.011), percentage of peripheral arterial disease ≥10% (P = 0.030), patients with stable CAS (P = 0.011), patients using atorvastatin (P = 0.015), follow-up duration ≥3 years (P = 0.011), and study with moderate quality (P = 0.013). Intensive statin therapy should be considered for CAS patients at high risk of stroke events. Further large-scale RCT should be conducted to verify the results of stratified analysis in this study.