According to a report at an American Heart Association conference, inflammation may be as critical a predictor for heart-disease risk as a patient's cholesterol score. It appears that people with low or normal cholesterol and no big risk for heart disease dramatically lowered their chances of dying or having a heart attack if they took the cholesterol pill Crestor. The maker of the drug, AstraZeneca, funded the study.

The study involved nearly 18,000 patients and has shown for the first time that giving a cholesterol-lowering statin drug to apparently healthy people with normal cholesterol can cut their risk of heart attacks, stroke and death by nearly half, doctors said Sunday.

However, each subject of the study had elevated levels of "high-sensitivity C-reactive protein," a marker that indicates inflammation in the body and can contribute to coronary heart disease, the Number 1 killer of men and women in the United States.

Throughout the research the participants took 20 milligrams of the drug Rosuvastatin, also known as Crestor, or a placebo pill. Bad cholesterol levels were reduced by 50 percent and “high-sensitivity C-reactive protein” levels dropped 37 percent. All in all death in the Crestor group was 20 percent less than the placebo group.

"This takes prevention to a whole new level, because it applies to patients who we now wouldn't have any evidence to treat," said Dr. W. Douglas Weaver, a Detroit cardiologist and president of the American College of Cardiology, according to the Associated Press.

The treatment could prevent 50,000 heart attacks, strokes and deaths each year if it were widely adopted, experts said, due to the fact that about half of heart attacks occur in patients who do not have high cholesterol levels.