June 2, 2022
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) measures support the importance of statin therapy to reduce risk of diabetes and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) complications.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. It’s estimated that 92.1 million American adults have one or more types of cardiovascular disease (Benjamin et al., 2017). People with diabetes also have elevated cardiovascular
risk, thought to be due, in part, to elevations in unhealthy cholesterol levels. Having unhealthy cholesterol levels places people at significant risk for developing ASCVD.
The American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) guidelines state that statins of moderate or high intensity are recommended for adults with established clinical ASCVD. The American Diabetes Association and ACC/AHA guidelines
also recommend statins for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease in patients with diabetes, based on age and other risk factors. Guidelines also state that adherence to statins will aid in ASCVD risk reduction in both populations.
CMS has two star measures to support statin therapy’s importance in the Medicare population. To learn more about these measures, read these tip sheets:
Statin Therapy for Patients with
Cardiovascular Disease
Statin Use in Persons with Diabetes (SUPD)
For more information and/or questions about this article, please email ProviderClinicalConsulting@Premera.com.
For more provider guides and tip sheets, visit our new Quality and Coding Tools
web page.
Source:Statin Therapy for Patients With Cardiovascular Disease and
Diabetes - NCQA
1 Benjamin, E.J., et al. 2017. “Heart disease and stroke statistics-2017 update: a report from the American Heart Association.” Circulation 135(10): e146–e603. doi:10.1161/CIR.0000000000000485.
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