Lipid-lowering Therapy Individualization

Atorvastatin is widely prescribed for the treatment of hypercholesterolemia to prevent the risk of cardiovascular diseases, a leading death cause in industrialized countries. There exists considerable inter-individual variability in response to statins, reflected by differences in lipid-lowering effect or risk of presenting adverse drug reaction; mainly myotoxicity. A plethora of different factors (demographic, genetic, physiopathologic, environmental...) have been tested to explain this variability but it lacks of pharmacokinetic (PK) data and/or replications of observations are rare and results remain inconclusive, probably because of non-adapted designs and no-clear driven-hypothesis but also due to a lack of scientific rationale and deep mechanistic understanding. This clinical study will explore individual factors influencing statin PK in a cohort of 150 patients treated with atorvastatin. The collection of meticulous clinical PK data and a rigorous statistical analysis will allow quantifying the effect of each identified parameter on statin PK and eventually, defining a population-based PK model taking into account the combined effect of all covariates in a quantitative approach. This innovative prospectively designed clinical study will ultimately allow predicting atorvastatin PK fluctuations and anticipating any inadequate dosing in clinical care.