Statins don’t cause aches and pains, study declares

STATINS have been wrongly blamed for muscle pains that are a really a symptom of old age, a study concludes today.

Millions are put off the life-saving pills by claims that they commonly cause aches and pains.

But University of Oxford researchers have shown ‘definitively’ that warnings about the potential side-effect are unfounded. They say people’s complaints are largely ordinary niggles often the result of ageing.

The ‘gold standard’ study, published in The Lancet, involved 155,000 patients and found an almost identical risk of muscle pain in people not taking statins. Those on the cholesterol-lowering drugs had a 27.1 per cent chance of suffering an ache, compared with 26.6 per cent given dummy pills.

Neither the patients nor their doctors knew which they had been given to ensure the results were not biased.

Analysis revealed the pills, which cost 4p a day, caused muscle pain in only one in 100 users and 14 out of 15 reported cases of muscle pain were due to something else.

Four in ten adults are eligible for the drugs, including all over-75s, most over-60s and those in middle age with conditions such as diabetes. But only around eight million take them, meaning millions miss out on their power to prevent heart attacks and strokes.

Around half of patients stop taking them, with many blaming muscle pain.

Professor Colin Baigent of the University of Oxford, the study’s lead author, said the ‘monumental’ research showed that for most people ‘the potential benefits of statin therapy are likely to outweigh the muscle pain risks’.

The study, which was co-funded by the British Heart Foundation, was presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Barcelona.