ExPRESS FHTwo-Year Efficacy and Safety of Simvastatin 80 mg
Pernette R.W. de Sauvage Nolting, MD, Rudolf J.A. Buirma, MD, Barbara A. Hutten, PhD, and John J.P. Kastelein, MD, PhD, on behalf of the Dutch ExPRESS Investigators Group
Two-Year Efficacy and Safety of Simvastatin 80 mg in Familial Hypercholesterolemia (The Examination of Probands and Relatives in Statin Studies With Familial Hypercholesterolemia
Conventional doses of statins rarely achieve targeted reductions of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol in patients with familial hypercholesterolemia (FH). Our study was designed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of high-dose (80 mg) simvastatin in >500 patients with FH. For this open-label multicenter study, patients with FH were recruited from 37 lipid clinics in The Netherlands. Patients were included if they met the following criteria: all patients had to have either a molecular diagnosis for FH or were diagnosed with definite FH and had to have 6 points according to an algorithm (to allow standardization of the diagnosis of FH based on clinical findings, personal and familial clinical history, and biochemical parameters, at least 18 years of age and patients with a history of myocardial infarction, coronary artery bypass graft surgery, or per- cutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty could beincluded if the physician thought it was medically allowed for the patient to have a washout period.