Abstract
Background: Cysteinyl leukotrienes are pro-inflammatory mediators with a
clinically established role in asthma and a potential human genetic and
preclinical role in cardiovascular diseases. Given that cardiovascular
disease has a critical inflammatory component, the use of a leukotriene
antagonist may represent an innovative therapy to target inflammation in
cardiovascular prevention. Methods: We performed an observational
retrospective (three years) study on eight hundred asthmatic patients 18
years or older in Albania, equally classified in two cohorts, exposed or
non-exposed to montelukast, matched by age and gender. Patients with a
previous history of myocardial infarction or ischemic stroke were
excluded. Results: we considered eight hundred asthmatic patients (368
male and 432 female) 18 years or older. Overall 37 (4.6%) of the
asthmatic patients, 32 non-exposed and 5 exposed, suffered a major
cardiovascular event during the 3 years observation period. All the
cardiovascular events occurred among patients with an increased
cardiovascular risk. Thus, we used both a propensity score (PS) matching
and a PS adjusted Cox model for analysis. In both analyses exposure to
montelukast remained a significant protective factor for incident
ischemic events (HR = 0.222; HR = 0.241, respectively), independently
from gender. The event-free Kaplan-Meier survival curves confirmed the
lower cardiovascular incidence of patients exposed to montelukast (p =
<0.0001). Conclusion: Collectively, our data indicates that
there is a potential protective role of montelukast for incident
ischemic events in the older asthmatic population, suggesting a
co-morbidity benefit of montelukast in asthmatics and possible
innovative therapy to target inflammation for cardiovascular prevention.