Has the introduction of NHS health checks increased the prescription of statins for CVD prevention?

Background: Over four millions people in England are estimated to have a CVD and they are responsible for over one third of deaths and a fifth of hospital admissions in England every year. In prioritising the reduction of premature mortality there has been a focus on improving prevention and early diagnosis and in 2009 the Department of Health implemented the NHS Health Checks (HC) policy. In the past years, the prescriptions of statins have increased and it is interesting to see whether these increases have continued or intensified with changes in CVD detection. Aim: Uncover the association existing between the prescriptions of high and low doses statins and the number of health checks provided across PCTs and see whether this association persists after controlling for a number of characteristics strongly associated with statin prescriptions. Data: Our analysis relies on the British National Formulary data, which give information about statins prescription in each PCT in 2012. We extracted health checks data from NHS England statistics and we collected additional statistics to control for the socioeconomic and health context. Method: We consider a log linear regression model respectively for high dose and low dose statins in 144 PCTs. Results: We found a positive, robust and significant association between NHS HC received and high dose prescription while the associations observed for low dose statin in all models are not significant. Conclusion: To our knowledge, this study is the first to associate high and low dose statins prescription with the NHS health checks programme three years after the implementation of the programme in all PCTs in England. The higher significance association for high dose statins suggests that health check programme was effective at targeting people at high risk.