For people with heart artery disease already taking cholesterol pills, adding one of two other types of cholesterol drugs helps lower their chances of heart attacks and strokes — especially strokes —...

Even if you add extra cholesterol drugs like ezetimibe, bempedoic acid, or PCSK-9 inhibitors to statins, people with heart disease don’t live longer — it helps prevent heart attacks, but doesn’t seem to help them survive overall.

For people with heart disease, adding certain cholesterol-lowering drugs to their usual statin medicine cuts the chance of having a stroke by 23%—and this protection might be even better than for heart attacks.

Taking cholesterol-lowering drugs like statins, ezetimibe, or PCSK9 inhibitors can help people live longer—whether they already have heart disease or not—by slightly reducing their risk of dying from any cause or from heart problems.

For people with high cholesterol and a high risk of heart disease, taking ezetimibe with a statin doesn’t prevent death, heart attacks, chest pain, or strokes better than just taking a higher dose of the statin—even though it improves cholesterol numbers more.

For people at risk of heart disease, adding a drug called ezetimibe to their cholesterol medicine might lower bad cholesterol more than just increasing the dose of their current pill — and more people hit their cholesterol goals — but it doesn’t seem to change the risk of heart attacks or side effects.