CORONA: Study on statins in Systemic Heart Failure

The CORONA study was led by Dr Hjalmarson (of metoprolol in heart failure trial) of Goteborg, Sweden. It stands for "Controlled Rosuvastatin in Multinational Trial in Heart Failure". This study was presented at the on-going American Heart Association Annual Scientific Meeting. They studied 10mg Rosuvastatin against placebo in 5,011 patients in systolic heart failure. It is important to note that this study was done in Europe. The USA FDA would never have allowed ischemic heart disease patients to be given a placebo.

The result was that rosuvastatin made no difference to the primary endpoint MACE. There was however a difference in the number of hospital admissions. Looks like Rosuvastatins may not be of much help in heart failure.

I am one of those who believes that statins may help in heart failure, so I examined the details. It looks like this population under study had some patients with non-ischemic heart failure. Some of the patients had normal cholesterol levels. Maybe the heart failure groups had low EFs and were in the high risk good. They were also old (average age 73yrs). Perhaps the statins did not have enough time to work. I would like to see more studies on statins and heart failure. Perhaps statins could still be found to have a role in heart failure.