Statins and the Risk of Herpes Zoster: A Population-Based Cohort Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Statins are widely used lipid-lowering drugs with immunomodulatory properties that may favor reactivation of latent varicella-zoster virus infection. However, whether statins increase the risk of herpes zoster is unknown. METHODS: We conducted a population-based retrospective cohort study of Ontario residents aged ≥ 66 years between 1 April 1997 and 31 March 2010 to examine the association between statin use and incidence of herpes zoster. We used propensity score matching to ensure similarity between users and nonusers of statins, and Cox proportional hazard models to assess differences in outcomes between study groups. To test the specificity of our findings, we examined the association between statin exposure and knee arthroplasty. RESULTS: During the 13-year study period, we matched 494 651 individuals treated with a statin to an equal number of untreated individuals. In the main analysis, the rate of herpes zoster was higher among users of statins relative to nonusers of these drugs (13.25 vs 11.71 per 1000 person-years, respectively; hazard ratio [HR], 1.13; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.10-1.17). The attributable fraction of exposed individuals was 11.6%. In a prespecified analysis, we found a similar risk of herpes zoster among statin users in the subgroup of patients with diabetes (HR, 1.18; 95% CI, 1.09-1.27). As expected, we found no association between statin use and knee arthroplasty (HR, 1.04; 95% CI, .99-1.09). CONCLUSIONS: Among older patients, treatment with statins is associated with a small but significantly increased risk of herpes zoster.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".