Dr. Stroes concurred. "We are absolutely not in competition with statins; we have to start with statins," he emphasized. "What I hope is that while we’re waiting for the outcome study, that we’ll be able to continue treating these patients in open-label extension studies, because they don’t have an alternative."
Discussant Dr. Joseph S. Alpert called the evolocumab results "very dramatic. Like everybody else, I’m waiting to see the outcome data. My prediction is that it’s going to be a positive trial," said Dr. Alpert, professor of medicine and director of the coronary care unit at University of Arizona Medical Center, Tucson.
If that proves to be the case, he added, it would probably result in a return to the ‘treat to target/know your LDL number’ approach that the ACC/American Heart Association guidelines turned away from last year in an enormously controversial move.
Simultaneous with Dr. Stroes’s presentation of GAUSS-2, the study was published online (J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. 2014 [doi:10.1016/j.jacc.2014.03.019]).
Dr. Stroes and Dr. Robinson serve as consultants to Amgen, which sponsored the studies.