Serious statin side effects on muscles are extremely rare, new research confirms

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June 25, 2026, 6:30 PM EDT<br>By Kaitlin Sullivan

People are more worried about severe muscular problems when taking statins than they should be: Such side effects are exceedingly rare, research published Thursday in the journal The Lancet Digital Health reaffirms.<br>Limited time: Save 25% on NBC News subscription<br>Get exclusive reporting, live Q&As and ad-free reading.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, and statins can lower LDL cholesterol levels by as much as 60%, reducing a person’s risk of a heart attack or stroke. But despite more than 50 years of data showing the cholesterol-lowering medications are safe, many people are still hesitant to take statins, fearing side effects.

Less than half of the 50 million people in the United States who could benefit from statins use them, and up to one-third of people never fill their statin prescriptions. And it’s not uncommon for people to stop taking the drug soon after it’s prescribed: Research has shown that about 40% of people prescribed a statin quit taking the drug within three months.<br>“There is a huge worry in the general population about these drugs based on rare side effects,” said Dr. Nishant Shah, a preventive cardiologist at Duke Health in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved with the latest research.<br>In the new study, British researchers developed a tool that can help doctors predict their patients’ risk of statin side effects, including muscle disorders.<br>They include myopathy, a broad term for conditions that affect muscles and cause soreness, weakness and fatigue; myalgia, which refers to muscle pain; and rhabdomyolysis, a dangerous condition in which muscle tissue rapidly breaks down and toxins leak into the blood.

Rhabdomyolysis can be deadly.<br>The new study, which used medical record data from nearly 6 million adults in the United Kingdom, found that only about 0.04% of people had a 10-year risk of statin-related serious muscle disorders above 10%.<br>That’s even lower than previous figures, including from an American Heart Association report, which put the rate of myopathy at less than 1% and the rate of rhabdomyolysis at less than 0.1%.<br>“Even if you increase that tenfold, that is still a very tiny risk,” said Dr. Bart Duell, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, who co-authored the AHA report but was not involved in the new research. The risk of muscular side effects “really isn’t a reason to not use statins,” he added.<br>In clinical trials, people taking a statin were slightly more likely to report mild muscle pain than people taking a placebo, but in the majority of those cases, the muscle pain had been caused by something other than the drug.<br>While patients should be aware of potential side effects for any medication, experts said many overestimate the risk of statins.

“In the 40 years I have been practicing I have never admitted a patient to the hospital from a muscle disorder associated with statins,” said Dr. Steve Nissen, chief academic officer of the Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic, who was not involved with the study. Nissen consults for statin-makers AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Novartis and Pfizer but does not receive financial compensation.<br>Misinformation fueling fear<br>Statins — including atorvastatin (Lipitor), rosuvastatin (Crestor) and simvastatin (Zocor), among others — are some of the most widely prescribed and most studied drugs in the world.

“It’s unclear to us why statin side effects draw so much attention compared to other drugs,” said study co-author Ting Cai, a research fellow at the University of Oxford Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences in the U.K.<br>Shah, of Duke Health, said the belief that statins are more dangerous than they are stems from a confluence of factors.

“There is a lot of social media messaging out there about it, there’s medical misinformation on non-peer-reviewed websites out there, there are just word-of-mouth concerns, anecdotal stories of maybe family members having issues,” Shah said. “It all kind of adds to the concern and then people communicate and communicate until that belief is widely spread.”<br>Duell said patients need to weigh the risks and benefits for any medication.

“For someone who has high cholesterol and maybe a family history of heart disease, the very small risk of side effects is hugely overshadowed by the benefits of lowering cholesterol with medication,” he said.<br>He added that if people start taking a statin and have any concerns, they should tell their doctor.<br>“There’s a huge gap between being normal before the statin and having that severe complication, so our goal is always to intervene before there is any severe injury such as muscle breakdown,” he said.<br>Doctors...