BMJ may retract articles suggesting harmful side-effects from cholesterol-reducing statins

Two articles suggesting cholesterol-reducing statins might be unsafe would be investigated and possibly be retracted by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

The authors had withdrawn figures suggesting up to 20 per cent of users would suffer harmful side effects such as liver disease and kidney problems.
In the UK around 7 million people at risk of heart disease are prescribed statins.

According to experts, the articles reported in October would have discouraged people from taking them.

The BBC quoted BMJ editor-in-chief Dr Fiona Godlee as saying, it was publicising the withdrawal of the side-effects figures "so that patients who could benefit from statins are not wrongly deterred from starting or continuing treatment because of exaggerated concerns over side effects".

No drug is known to be completely safe and even paracetamol came with side effects, but the real question was whether the benefits of statins, such as cutting the odds of a heart attack, outweighed the risks which included type-2 diabetes.

Currently the drugs are given to patients at high risk of heart disease, often following a heart attack and these patients had the most to gain with the lowering of cholesterol.

Meanwhile, professor Rory Collins, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Oxford, had called for the articles - which re-analysed data from a collaboration led by him - to be retracted after a separate, uncontrolled, observational study was cited by both the articles.

The study's authors - Dr John Abrahamson from Harvard University and UK-based cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra - had agreed to withdraw their statements that statins side effects occured in 18-20 per cent of cases, which was based on the incorrect, unobserved study.