My father died of a heart attack when he was 43. My mother died of heart disease when she was 78. But three of my four grandparents lived into their 80s, and one grandmother lived to 96.
This history, combined with my cholesterol blood readings, has led my family physician to recommend that I take statins as a preventive measure. My good cholesterol is sky-high good, but the bad cholesterol and total cholesterol readings are in the "moderate-to-high" risk range. The cholesterol readings themselves would not have led her to put me on statins, but combined with my family history they did.
I had doubts and questions, resisting them for a long time. And now I read this, which suggests that statins as a preventive medicine are not all that effective and can have some serious side effects.
The medical community is debating the pros and cons of using statins for prevention as more independent research comes out on side-effects. This week, a study in JAMA Internal Medicine suggested statins may be associated with an increase in musculoskeletal conditions and pain, especially in physically active individuals.
"If you look at all the studies that have ever been done with statins for primary prevention, so for people who have never had a heart attack or a stroke, if you give a statin to a patient for about five years we can reduce the chance of a person having a heart attack or a stroke by about one per cent," said James McCormack, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of British Columbia.
This stuff raises serious doubts in my mind about continuing to take statins as a preventive measure. The comments there are lengthy and well-worth reading as well.
One recent meta study is here [h/t Jack]. My take on this article is that the higher potency statins might have some small effect on reducing heart attacks, strokes, etc., but that the effect is small and barely significant, either statistically or medically. The material in this study is fairly well-summarized in its Figure 2 and the accompanying table, reproduced here (you may have to click on it to see it clearly).
The potential effectiveness of statins is masked, somewhat, by the inexplicable use of a log scale on the horizontal axis. Also, I would settle for 90% confidence intervals for things like this. But still, it looks as if statin use as a preventive measure has at best only a small expected effectiveness on average.
And yet for a person saved from a heart attack, that is hardly a minor effect.