There’s new evidence suggesting that nearly all of the side effects patients perceive when they take a statin may not be due to the drug at all.

UK researchers found that daily side-effect logs revealed 90% of the symptom burden elicited by a statin challenge were also elicited by placebo.

A phenomenon called the ‘nocebo effect’ where just the act of taking a medicine gives a patient the illusion the drug is causing unwanted symptom.

In the study, half of the 60 volunteers who had stopped taking a statin went back to the treatment after they participated in a blinded test where they randomly took 20mg of atorvastatin daily for four months of the year, a matched placebo tablet for four months, or no tablet at all.