Early findings in the laboratory suggest that cholesterol-lowering statin drugs might prove an effective treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.
Japanese researchers say the statin drug fluvastatin induced apoptosis (programmed cell death) in synovial cells collected from people with rheumatoid arthritis .
People with rheumatoid arthritis experience abnormal proliferation of the synovial tissue that lines the joints. This is the first study to show that statins induce the death of these excess synovial cells.
“In the present study, we demonstrated that fluvastatin induced apoptosis in synoviocytes from patients with rheumatoid arthritis, but not in those from patients with [non-rheumatoid] osteoarthropathy,” said researchers led by Takao Nagashima of Jichi Medical School, in Tochigi. That finding suggests that the cell-killing effect of statins is specific to inflammatory processes that characterize rheumatoid arthritis, the researchers said.