Anticholesterol drugs work in healthy folks.

People with slightly above average amounts of cholesterol in their blood and no history of heart disease can benefit from the cholesterol-reducing drug lovastatin, a Texas study shows.

A separate study demonstrates that another cholesterol fighter, pravastatin, reverses plaque buildup inside the carotid arteries of people who have had a brush with heart disease but whose cholesterol is normal.

The studies bolster previous findings that these chemically related drugs can delay or prevent cardiovascular problems in healthy people who have cholesterol readings a doctor wouldn't consider unusual (SN: 10/5/96, p. 215). The research complements evidence that the natural constituents found in soy and certain other plants can also lower near-normal cholesterol (see p. 348).

In the Texas study, researchers gave lovastatin to 2,335 people and an inactive substitute to 2,081. Most of the volunteers were men, their average age was 58, and none had a history of heart problems.

After about 5 years, 97 people getting the inactive pills had suffered heart attacks, compared to only 57 of those taking lovastatin, the researchers report in the May 27 Journal of the American Medical Association. Those getting the placebo also endured slightly more occurrences of unstable angina, a tightening of the chest caused by blocked blood flow, says study coauthor John R. Downs, an internist at the Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

The men and women entered the study with cholesterol readings averaging 221, slightly higher than most doctors consider optimal but representing only the 51st percentile for adults in the United States.

"It's an extremely important study," says Frank M. Sacks of Harvard Medical School in Boston. "It extends the benefit of primary prevention of coronary disease from the small segment of the population that has [high cholesterol] to a much larger section of the population that has average to mildly elevated cholesterol."

In the other study, which appears in the May 12 Circulation, researchers in New Zealand and Australia tested 522 people with normal cholesterol readings but a history of heart disease. Half received pravastatin, half took a placebo, and all ate a low-fat diet. Four years later, arterial plaque had diminished in the pravastatin group but thickened in the placebo group, report the researchers, led by scientists at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.