A previously published post-hoc subgroup analysis demonstrated
that CORONA patients with less advanced heart failure randomized
to rosuvastatin vs. placebo had fewer atherothrombotic
events.19 A plausible explanation for these findings is that patients
with less advanced heart failure are more likely to live long enough
to experience the benefit of statins preventing atherothrombotic
events. Other than this previous analysis, statins had not been
shown to significantly reduce the incidence of CVD or mortality
.among heart failure patients in large randomized trials despite having
been shown to reduce CVD event rates in most other patient
groups studied.4 –16 Our finding that rosuvastatin statistically
significantly decreased risk for MI among pooled CORONA and
GISSI-HF participants with ischaemic aetiology of heart failure is
not entirely surprising in light of the non-significant trend toward
decreased risk for MI observed in initial separate CORONA
and GISSI-HF analyses.15,16 By pooling data from CORONA and
GISSI-HF, which had previously been analysed separately, we
increased our power to detect a statistically significant difference
in outcomes between rosuvastatin and placebo groups.