Abstract

Statins are widely prescribed, but many patients report symptoms that they attribute to statin treatment, and such symptoms often lead to treatment discontinuation. Much public discourse on the safety of statins is based on unreliable information derived from non-randomized studies.

Over the past 5 years all the available information on adverse event reports in all large blinded randomized trials of statin therapy has been collected and processed into an individual patient meta-analysis, allowing the true effects of statins on particular adverse events to be studied in detail.

This talk will focus on our findings regarding the effects of statins on muscle and on the risk of developing diabetes mellitus, and Colin will discuss the implications of these findings.