Seven years ago when my kidneys failed, I had a nasty fight with sepsis, a sometimes lethal blood infection and the leading cause of death in non-coronary intensive care units in the United States. I almost lost.
Now comes news of a new study indicating that statins—the drugs millions of people take for high cholesterol—may lower the risk of sepsis in dialysis patients.
A Johns Hopkins team studied 1,041 dialysis patients over a 10 year period:
“‘Those taking statins had a 41 in a 1,000 chance of being hospitalized for sepsis, while the other group not taking statins had a 110 out of 1,000 risk. Although the overall absolute risk is relatively small, the statin group’s risk is dramatically lower,’ says Rajesh Gupta M.D., the study’s lead author, who was a senior medical resident at Hopkins when the study was conducted.”
One of the co-morbidities of kidney failure is a severely suppressed immune system. While the Johns Hopkins researchers aren’t sure why statins reduce the sepsis risk, it is known that statins have an effect on the immune system. Researchers hypothesize that either the statins may regulate the immune system’s response to infection or the compounds fight microrganisms directly.
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