Statins reduce mortality in sepsis
Statin therapy reduces the risk of death significantly for patients with sepsis, researchers reported on June 6, 2025 in Frontiers in Immunology.
As background, the authors noted that sepsis happens when the immune system overshoots its inflammatory reaction to an infection, so strongly that the vital organs begin to shut down.
“Our large, matched cohort study found that treatment with statins was associated with a 39% lower death rate for critically ill patients with sepsis, when measured over 28 days after hospital admission,” said Dr Caifeng Li, the study’s corresponding author and an associate professor at Tianjin Medical University General Hospital in China.
Statins are widely used to protect against cardiovascular disease, by lowering LDL cholesterol and triglycerides and raising HDL cholesterol. “Statins have anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, antioxidative, and antithrombotic properties. They may help mitigate excessive inflammatory response, restore endothelial function, and show potential antimicrobial activities,” said Li.
The investigators conducted a retrospective study of data from the Medical Information Mart in Intensive Care-IV (MIMIC-IV) database, which holds the anonymized e-health records of 265,000 patients admitted to the emergency department and the intensive care unit of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of Boston between 2008 and 2019.
Adults with a diagnosis of sepsis hospitalized for longer than 24 hours were included in the new analysis.
The primary outcome was 28-day all-cause mortality.
Using standard statistical tools, the investigators generated balanced cohorts of 6,070 sepsis subjects for each study cohort — those who had received statin treatment and those who had not.
Analysis revealed significantly lower 28-day all-cause mortality in the statin group (14.3% [870/6070]) compared to the no statin group (23.4% [1421/6070]).
In subgroup analyses, the statin benefit was consistent across different baseline characteristics of patients. Additionally, statin treatment was associated with significantly decreased ICU mortality, and with significantly reduced in-hospital mortality.
“These results strongly suggest that statins may provide a protective effect and improve clinical outcomes for patients with sepsis,” concluded Li.
“Further high-quality prospective studies are still needed to verify our findings,” the authors added.
