People are more worried about severe muscular problems when taking statins than they should be: These side effects are exceedingly rare, research published Thursday in the journal The Lancet Digital Health reaffirms.Limited time: Save 25% on NBC News subscriptionGet exclusive reporting, live Q&As and ad-free reading.Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, and statins can lower LDL cholesterol levels by as much as 60%, reducing a person’s risk of a heart attack or stroke.
But despite more than 50 years of data showing the cholesterol-lowering medications are safe, many people are still hesitant to take statins, fearing side effects.Less than half of the some 50 million people in the United States who could benefit from statins use them, and up to one-third of people never fill their statin prescriptions.And it’s not uncommon for people to stop taking the drug soon after it’s prescribed: Research has shown that about 40% of people prescribed a statin quit taking the drug within three months.“There is a huge worry in the general population about these drugs based on rare side effects,” said Dr.
Nishant Shah, a preventative cardiologist at Duke Health in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved with the latest research.In the new study, British researchers developed a tool that can help doctors predict their patients’ risk of statin side effects, including muscle disorders.These include myopathy, a broad term for conditions that affect muscles and cause soreness, weakness and fatigue; myalgia, which refers to muscle pain; and rhabdomyolysis, a dangerous condition in which muscle tissue rapidly breaks down and toxins leak into the blood.
Rhabdomyolysis can be deadly.The new study, which used medical record data from nearly 6 million adults in the United Kingdom, found that only about 0.04% of people had a 10-year risk of statin-related serious muscle disorders above 10%.That’s even lower than previous figures, including from an Am...