Three reports given at the annual meeting of the American Association for Clinical Oncology suggest the statin drugs may also prevent lung, prostate and breast cancer, said Ruby Kochhar, a medical oncologist at the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Va.

In the case of breast cancer, researchers compared statin use over a six-year period among 556 female veterans with breast cancer and 39,865 without the disease. Those who used statins were 51 per cent less likely to get breast cancer than non-users, said Vikas Khurana, an assistant professor of medicine at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport, La.

It's too early to start recommending statins for cancer prevention, Khurana said, but the new findings may give the drugs an edge when doctors and patients are choosing a drug to lower cholesterol.