COX-2 Inhibitors Blunt "Preconditioning" Effect of Statin

The COX-2 inhibitor celecoxib (Celebrex, Pfizer) completely abolished the beneficial preconditioning effect of rosuvastatin (Crestor, AstraZeneca) in a small mechanistic study in human volunteers according to the recent issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Rosuvastatin prevented the development of ischemia and reperfusion-induced endothelial dysfunction, but pretreatment with celecoxib completely abolished this protective effect. It is the first look at the interaction between a statin and a selective COX-2 inhibitor. "Theoretically, there could be a net negative effect on a patient taking a COX-2 inhibitor who has an acute cardiac event who also happens to be on a statin or is given a statin acutely. We are a long way from clinical relevance here, because we've made just a mechanistic observation," researchers state.