Statin-related side effects: the recent Lancet publication is biased toward false-negatives

These are great points. I would also encourage us to try to answer a perhaps more clinically useful question: By how much does statin increase the overall severity/frequency of side effects? A “side effect ordinal scale” such as one that captures the worst side effect that happened to each patient, would allow this to be done. We need to get away, in my view, from multiple univariate assessments that are difficult to trade off. My limited knowledge of the statin side effect literature was from a paper comparing placebo muscle pain occurrence to statin, and there was a higher incidence of muscle pain in placebo patients. That almost closes the case, doesn’t it?