If your on a statin, skip the article and read the comments.
If your not on a statin, read them anyway, and commit them to memory.
Sir Rory Collins, of Oxford University, said taking cholesterol-lowering statins before warning signs start to appear could provide much more protection from heart attacks or stroke.
He accused medical regulators of overstating the possible sideeffects of statins, the majority of which have not been borne out in clinical trials, because it could encourage them to stop taking the medication and put their health at risk.
He disputed claims that statins can cause sleep disturbances, memory loss, sexual dysfunction, depression, lung disease, cataracts, diabetes, memory loss and confusion.
The only sideeffect proven by experiments is a very low risk of myopathy - a condition which causes muscles to weaken - which is easily outweiged by the benefit to the heart of taking the drugs, Sir Rory said.
Sir Rory said current guidelines on statin use should be scrapped and
