Varenicline and Adverse Cardiovascular Events: A Systematic Review and Meta‐Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Varenicline is an efficacious smoking-cessation drug. However, previous meta-analyses provide conflicting results regarding its cardiovascular safety. The publication of several new randomized controlled trials (RCTs) provides an opportunity to reassess this potential adverse drug reaction. METHODS AND RESULTS: We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library for RCTs that compare varenicline with placebo for smoking cessation. RCTs reporting cardiovascular serious adverse events and/or all-cause mortality during the treatment period or within 30 days of treatment discontinuation were eligible for inclusion. Relative risks (RRs) with 95% CIs were generated by using DerSimonian-Laird random-effects models. Thirty-eight RCTs met our inclusion criteria (N=12 706). Events were rare in both varenicline (57/7213) and placebo (43/5493) arms. No difference was observed for cardiovascular serious adverse events when comparing varenicline with placebo (RR 1.03, 95% CI 0.72-1.49). Similar findings were obtained when examining cardiovascular (RR 1.04, 95% CI 0.57-1.89) and noncardiovascular patients (RR 1.03, 95% CI 0.64-1.64). Deaths were rare in both varenicline (11/7213) and placebo (9/5493) arms. Although 95% CIs were wide, pooling of all-cause mortality found no difference between groups (RR 0.88, 95% CI 0.50-1.52), including when stratified by participants with (RR 1.24, 95% CI 0.40-3.83) and without (RR 0.77, 95% CI 0.40-1.48) cardiovascular disease. CONCLUSIONS: We found no evidence that varenicline increases the rate of cardiovascular serious adverse events. Results were similar among those with and without cardiovascular disease. Given varenicline's efficacy as a smoking cessation drug and the long-term cardiovascular benefits of cessation, it should continue to be prescribed for smoking cessation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.041 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.057 | 0.025 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".