The so-called Jupiter study was designed to see if giving Crestor to patients with no sign of pre-existing cardiovascular disease and low to normal levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol but raised C-reactive protein (CRP) would reduce heart attacks and other major cardiovascular events.
Not a complete surprise (as I have said before there is moderately good evidence that much (or even most) of the benefit of statins is CRP related). But given that CRP has fallen out of favor recently this should reinvigorate it.
PS The reason it has fallen out of favor are:
a) that it, when compared to the complete set of other markers (LDL, HDL, BMI, Blood Pressure, smoking, ...), is not an independent predictor. My comment on this is that:
a1) laboratory test results have a different behavior on humans than lifestyle things. Right or wrong.
a2) if a marker is very directly tied to a modality of treatment then even if that marker is not independent of a forest of other predictors then the marker should be used (as long as the marker cannot be definitively derived from the forest in some pre-determined fashion).
b) Docs don't trust the HS-CRP test because, unlike LDL tests, you get noise. Sometimes quite large spikes just do to an infection somewhere. Note: this is sloppy thinking - I'd rather have a test that showed correlation 0.60 to disease x than one that showed correlation 0.4 to disease x even if marker 2 was more stable (once wrong, always wrong).
AI
