Deepak Bhatt, MD: Icosapent Ethyl Use in Patients with Prior Myocardial Infarction

Icosapent ethyl may result in significant improvement in patients with prior myocardial infarction (MI), at risk for major adverse cardiovascular events.

In an interview with HCPLive®, Deepak Bhatt, MD, Executive Director of Interventional Cardiovascular Programs at Brigham and Women's Health, discussed the findings of the REDUCE-IT trial and an analysis of REDUCE-IT patients with prior MI.

Bhatt recently presented “Reduction in Ischemic Events, Including Cardiovascular Mortality, with Icosapent Ethyl in Patients with Prior Myocardial Infarction: REDUCE-IT PRIOR MI" online at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) 2021 Congress.

As the primary investigator of the REDUCE-IT, Bhatt disucssed its findings, noting a 26% relative risk reduction in time to first event and a 35% risk reduction in the total ischemic events in the patient population.

In further subgroups, he mentioned finding a consistent benefit of the agent versus placebo in patients, irrespective of history of prior coronary revascularization.

"The bottom line is, yes, treat patients appropriately with their MI with revascularization," Bhatt said. "But, irrespective of that background therapy, there's still a benefit of icosapent ethyl over placebo.

Further, Bhatt discussed the data show mortality was reduced from 6.4% to 4.5% for cardiovascular death and all-cause mortality had a reduction of 8.9% to 7.3%.

He explained a benefit of data from the REDUCE-IT trial is the subgroup of patients is easily identifiable by clinicians and can thus be treated with icosapent ethyl.

"This is a high risk population, therefore the absolute risk reduction with icosapent ethyl versus placebo are even larger than in the overall trial," Bhatt said. "To me, this is an easy to identify subgroup where we know there are at high risk and we really want to throw the kitchen sink at them in terms of advanced therapies beyond just high intensity statin, ACE inhibitor, beta blocker, etc."