The impact of this policy intervention is reflected on no variation in the yearlyincidence of overall statin use observed over two years 2008–2009, followed by an increase thereafter. Moreover, this influence was even more evident in terms of single statin use. Interestingly, as prompt response from GPs to the regional policy, the incidence of use per 1,000 inhabitants on 2009 drastically decreased for atorvastatin and rosuvastatin while increased for simvastatin and pravastatin. According to the type of prevention, although the point prevalence and incidence of statin use were lower for women than for men, there were more women than men in terms of the absolute number of newly initiated treatment anytime in our observation period. Surprisingly, the proportion of women was higher in primary than in secondary prevention. This is noteworthy because current evidence of lipid-lowering from clinical trials showing that women are relatively protected from cardiovascular events until menopausal age, support the use of AZ 960 statins on secondary prevention in women with previous coronary diseases. Nevertheless, since some recent evidence showed similar results to our study, it could imply that the focus on cardiovascular risk treatment in women is rising in the most recent years. However, in terms of age, our results showing that women that newly initiated a statin medication are significantly older than men are consistent with previous investigations. Looking at comorbidity history, we observed several differences among people starting on primary or secondary prevention, with more individuals with hyperlipidaemia or hypertension on primary prevention treatment and more patients with other cardiovascular risk factors, like arrhythmias valves disorders, cardiomyopathies or heart failure on secondary prevention treatment. With regard to individual medications, simvastatin, atorvastatin, rosuvastatin and pravastatin, were the most frequently prescribed statins as a first-line treatment, irrespective of the type of prevention, in line with previous investigations, but in contrast with the latest Italian National Reports of medication use which identified atorvastatin as the most prescribed statin in Italy, followed by rosuvastatin and simvastatin. The discrepancies across national and regional settings could be explained by the clinical impact of the regional policy intervention promoting the use of statins free of patent, as simvastatin and pravastatin. This result is, as described above, more evident from the analysis of the incidence stratified by calendar year and molecules, which showed an increase of new use of these two statins after 2008. On the other hand, the heterogeneity between results from our study and from OSMED could be due to different methodological measure of prescriptions as OSMED explored prevalent and naive users of statins while we focused only on naive users. Stratifying by the type of prevention, atorvastatin was significantly more prescribed for secondary prevention than for primary.