Muscle pain can certainly become a burden too big to carry, and it’s also causing some people to stay away from statins (aka HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors). These lipid-lowering meds can be very useful in the case of those who are at high risk of cardiovascular disease, but they are also believed to be causing muscle pain as a side effect.
CNN now tells us about a new study that shatters a misconception of some people who are afraid of statins. It claims that for the vast majority of individuals who take statins and also deal with muscle pain, it’s not those specific meds causing the pain at all.
90% of people with muscle pain who take statins shouldn’t blame it on the meds
The percentage of individuals who suffer from muscle pain that isn’t caused by statins is very high: 90%. That’s the conclusion of a meta-analysis involving 19 randomized, double-blind trials of over 1,000 participants each. Individuals were treated with both statins and placebos.
Colin Baigent, the author of the study and also a professor of epidemiology at the University of Oxford, explained as CNN quotes:
What we conclude is that there are two things that we need to do as a profession, as a society,
The first thing is, we need to do a better job of managing patients who report muscle pain when they are taking a statin, because there’s a tendency in patients to end up stopping the statin and that has a detrimental effect on their long term health. And the second thing we need to do is we need to look at the information that is available to patients in package inserts.
The new study was published in The Lancet.
