Study: 'Time bomb' heart patients aren't taking needed meds

Long after undergoing bypass surgery, a substantial number of patients fail to take a daily aspirin or statins, raising the risk of dangerous blood clots and heart attacks, a new study finds.

In a group of 381 patients who came in for a diagnostic catheterization at least three years after a bypass procedure, barely half were taking both statins and aspirin, according to the research, led by Thomas Jefferson University.

The rest - 48 percent of the group - had active prescriptions for just one of the two medicines, or neither.

This failing may be the result of a sense of complacency, said senior author Michael Savage, professor of cardiology at Jefferson's Kimmel Medical College.

People may be diligent about taking the drugs soon after bypass surgery, but they become less so as time goes on, he said. Sometimes even primary-care doctors fail to stress the need to continue the regimen, he said.

"I think there tends to be a false sense of security that the patients get, and maybe even their treating doctors get, because the patients have done well," Savage said. "And they don't recognize that they're a potentially ticking time bomb."

The patients in the study had undergone bypass surgery more than a decade earlier, on average. Such patients are advised to take cholesterol-lowering statins indefinitely, along with aspirin to prevent harmful clots, unless there is a medical reason to avoid either drug.

Patients taking statins had an average LDL "bad" cholesterol level of 87, compared to 106 for the non-takers in the study, whose lead author was Jefferson cardiology fellow Kevin Curl.

Savage said bypass patients as a whole might be better at taking their drugs than the people in the study, who had come in for a catheterization as the result of cardiac symptoms. The research was published online in the American Journal of Cardiology.

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