By JOHN O'NEIL

drug that lowers cholesterol also reduces inflammation of blood vessels, a study being published today has found, and does so quickly enough that the drug may find a new role in treating heart attacks.

In recent years, research has suggested that inflammation may rank alongside high cholesterol as a possible cause of heart disease. Inflammation also causes complications after heart attacks and heart surgery.

For instance, among people who had angioplasty, a common kind of heart surgery, those with high levels of inflammation were four times as likely to die of complications, according to figures cited in the article, which was published in the journal Circulation.

In the study, 20 people with high cholesterol levels were given the drug simvastatin for 14 days each and then given a placebo for another 14 days. Another 20 people were given the pills for the same times, but in the reverse order. The simvastatin reduced the levels of harmful cholesterol and lowered by more than a third the levels of a blood chemical that shows a patient has inflammation. The placebo had no effect.

Simvastatin and similar drugs, which are called statins, are generally used as long-term treatments to lower the risk of heart disease. But an author of the study, Dr. Robert H. Eckel of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, said the fast action of the simvastatin in lowering the inflammation raised a possibility that statins could be used for acute illness, too.

"If you can intervene at the time when somebody is in the emergency room and lessen the rise of inflammation" that would probably cut deaths, he said, although he added that the theory needed to be tested.