M ore of us than ever are taking statins. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) reported in October 2024 that around 5.3 million people in England had taken statins or the cholesterol-lowering medication ezetimibe in the previous year. That’s almost triple the figure for 2015/2016 and approaching 10 per cent of the country’s population. Meanwhile, statin use is also increasing globally.
Doctors prescribe statins to help prevent heart disease – currently the leading cause of death worldwide. They reduce low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol – the ‘bad’ type that clogs up arteries – by interfering with enzymes that our livers use to make cholesterol and helping draw it out of the blood. This makes statins effective at preventing heart attacks and strokes, but that alone doesn’t answer all the questions people have before they decide to start taking drugs like these. Questions like: if I have high cholesterol, do I have to take statins? Can I try changing my diet and doing more exercise first? And what kinds of side effects can I expect if I do start taking statins?
“Statins are probably the most widely studied drugs in medical history”