Fears over using statins could cost lives, warns expert

Professor Sir Rory Collins, from Oxford University, said he believes GPs and the public are being made suspicious of the drug.

The acedmic, one of the country’s top experts on the drug, is unhappy with the British Medical Journal (BMJ), which has run well-publicised articles by two critics of statins that he argues are flawed and misleading.

“It is a serious disservice to British and international medicine,” he said, claiming that it was probably killling more people than had been harmed as a result of the paper on the MMR vacine by Andrew Wakefield.

“I would think the papers on statins are far worse in terms of the harm they have done.”

Statins are currently being taken in the UK by 7 million people who have at least a 20 per cent risk of a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years.

Following a major study overseen by Collins’ team at Oxford in 2012, the National Institute for Heath and Care Excellence (Nice) recommended in Fabruary that they should be given to people at only 10 per cent risk – potentially dramatically increasing the number of people taking them.

A number of doctors are among thise who have questioned the wisdom of dosing healthy people to prevent, rather than treat illness.

Some of them doubt the data from the drug company trials, which has been made available to Collins and his team but nobody else.

Collins criticised two papers published by the BMJ – one by John Abramson, a clinician working at Harvard medical school, and the other by Aseem Malhotra, a cardioligist in the UK.

Both doctors said statins did not reduce mortality and that side effects mean they did more harm than good.