There is always interest in exploring new therapeutic uses for existing drugs, because existing medications are probably generic, and therefore less expensive because generic companies don't have to do any creative science or fund clinical trials, and popular drugs already have known side effect profiles.

For that reason, Chris Cardwell, PhD, a senior lecturer in medical statistics at the Centre for Public Health at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland and colleagues investigated whether lung cancer patients who received statins had improved cancer outcomes. They used data from nearly 14,000 patients newly diagnosed with lung cancer between 1998 and 2009 in the English cancer registry. They gathered the patients' prescription records from the U.K. Clinical Practice Research Datalink and mortality data up to 2012 from the Office of National Statistics.

Writing in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers&Prevention, they note that among patients who survived at least six months after a diagnosis, those who used statins after a lung cancer diagnosis had a statistically non-significant 11 percent reduction in lung cancer-specific deaths. Among those who used at least 12 prescriptions of statins there was a statistically significant 19 percent reduction in lung cancer-specific deaths, and among those who used lipophilic statins such as simvastatin there was a 19 percent reduction in lung cancer-specific deaths as well.

Among all patients in the study, those who used statins in the year before a lung cancer diagnosis had a statistically significant 12 percent reduction in lung cancer-specific deaths.  Outcomes were not different between non-small cell lung cancer patients and small cell lung cancer patients in the study.