In patients with chronic kidney disease, treatment with statins presumably not only has an influence on cardiovascular endpoints, but also delays the progression of the renal disease. Recommendations for the treatment of lipid metabolism disorders in the general population with normal renal function are based on numerous prospective, randomized and placebo-controlled studies. In contrast, recommendations for patients with pathological renal function can merely be extrapolated from the results of those studies. Post hoc analyses from the large pravastatin studies confirm a significant risk reduction of primary cardiovascular and cerebrovascular end points for the CDK stages 2 and 3. For CKD stages 4 and 5, available data are merely rudimentary, so that the results of ongoing studies will have to be awaited.