New NHS guidance: 40% of adults advised to take statins

With the goal to cut 50,000 deaths a year from strokes and heart attacks, NHS guidelines will advise 17.5 million people to take statins.

17:49 18 July 2014

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has released new guidelines advising the majority of men aged over 60 and women over 65 to take statins even if they only have one in 10 chances of developing cardiovascular diseases within 10 years.

The move aims to cut 50,000 deaths a year from strokes and heart attacks. Around 13 million people are already eligible for statins and this number will increase to 17.5 million following the new guidelines.

But Professor Mark Baker, Director of the Centre for Clinical Practice at Nice, said: “The tragedy is that many people who could benefit do not take statins. But we can’t force people to take them and we wouldn’t want to.

“There is a risk that the noise distorts the message to the point where people whose lives are going to be saved by statins come off them because they don’t understand the confusion courted by a small number of doctors.

“People are getting the wrong end of the stick. From a health point of view that is a tragedy waiting to happen.

“There is a real worry that we are going to end up with people not listening to the advice thye were given and feeling desperately sorry that they didn’t later.”

Liam Smeeth, professor of clinical epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, welcomed the new guideline, saying: “What matters is that more people will now be offered these effective drugs.

“We know that the more people who take statins long term the less heart attacks and strokes will happen. This is good news for individual patients and good news for the country as a whole.”