Type 2 diabetes leads to an increase in the prevalence of lipid abnormalities, which increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. Therefore, current guidelines generally recommend the use of moderate or high-intensity statins in patients with type 2 diabetes. There are still few studies on the overall risk benefit balance of statins for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) patients with diabetes. Compared with other types of lipid-lowering drugs, the advantage of statins for the prognosis of patients with AMI has not yet been determined. We investigated the effects of statins and non-statins on intensive care unit (ICU) and inpatient mortality in patients with AMI and diabetes.This study retrospectively collected all patients with AMI and diabetes in the Medical Information Mart Intensive Care-IV database. We assessed ICU and in-hospital mortality rates during hospitalization in both groups. The clinical end point was in-hospital mortality and ICU mortality. Kaplan-Meier and Cox proportional-hazards regression models were applied to analyze the correlation between the two groups and the outcomes.Data on 1,315 patients with AMI and diabetes were collected, among which 1,211 used statins during hospitalization. The overall in-hospital mortality of patients with AMI and diabetes was 17.2%, and the total ICU mortality was 12.6%. The in-hospital mortality was lower for the statin group than for the non-statin group (13.9% and 55.8%, respectively). Kaplan-Meier survival curves demonstrated that survival probability was higher in the statin group than in the non-statin group. In the cohort without hyperlipidemia, the statin group had lower risks of ICU death (HR = 0.12, 95% CI = 0.04-0.40) and in-hospital death (HR = 0.36, 95% CI = 0.16-0.84) compared with the non-statin group.Statins can significantly reduce ICU and in-hospital mortality rates in patients with AMI and diabetes. Even in the population without hyperlipidemia, statins can still reduce the mortality in patients with AMI and diabetes.Copyright © 2022 Lu, Zhang, Li, He, Huang, Lin, Yin and Lyu.