Do Statins Offset Venous Thrombosis Risk With Hormone Therapy?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

This is Dr JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. I'd like to talk with you about a recent report in JAMA Network Open on the subject of whether statin therapy may be able to offset some of the excess risk for venous thromboembolism (VTE) among women taking menopausal hormone therapy.

It's an important issue because we know that menopausal hormone therapy, especially oral therapy, is linked to an excess risk for VTE, approximately doubling of risk in the randomized clinical trials. There is also emerging evidence from some randomized trials, such as the Jupiter trial, that step therapy may be linked to a reduction in risk. This may be related to anti-inflammatory or antithrombotic effects of statin therapy.

The authors made use of a very large administrative claims database, Optum Health, to look at more than 15 million annual members. They were able to identify 2000 women with a diagnostic code for VTE treatment. The women were between ages 50 and 64 years, and they were compared with 200,000 controls without VTE, matched in 10-to-1 fashion.

About 50% of the women were taking oral hormone therapy, and about 50% took non-oral transdermal or other non-oral formulations of hormone therapy.