Statins are a widely available, cheap, safe, and extremely effective means to reduce the cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, and it is therefore a tragedy that these life-saving medicines are under-used. Non-adherence to statin therapy reaches up to 60% after 2 years, and cessation is associated with a significant increase in the risk of CVD events. Much of this discontinuation of therapy is driven by frequent and noisy negative denouncements of statins in the lay press and more recently in social media. This fosters the perception that treatment with this drug class is often associated with treatment-limiting adverse effects, even when overwhelming evidence suggests that the vast majority of patients can take statins safely.
