Lessons learned from the prospective pravastatin pooling project.

The Prospective Pravastatin Pooling (PPP) Project was a prospectively defined collaboration of three randomized, placebo-controlled, long-term, monotherapy (40 mg/d) trials of the lipid-lowering agent pravastatin. A pooled database of 19,768 participants with a mean of 5.2 years of follow-up was created, providing the investigators with over 100,000 patient-years of experience to address questions on total and cause-specific mortality, coronary incidence, stroke, and safety. One trial (West of Scotland Coronary Prevention Study) was primary prevention and two (Cholesterol and Recurrent Events and Long-term Intervention with Pravastatin in Ischemic Disease) were secondary prevention. Pravastatin was shown to safely reduce all-cause mortality, fatal and nonfatal coronary events, and stroke events in patients with a broad range of patient characteristics.