Muscle pain and damage

One of the most common complaints of people taking statins is muscle pain. You may feel this pain as a soreness, tiredness, or weakness in your muscles. The pain can be a mild discomfort, or it can be serious enough to make it hard to do your daily activities.

However, researchers have found a "nocebo effect" when it comes to people thinking they have muscle pain from statins. A nocebo effect means people who expect a negative side effect from a medicine report experiencing the potential side effect at higher rates than the medicine should cause.

The real risk of developing muscle pain from taking statins is about 5% or less compared with taking a placebo. A placebo is a pill that doesn't contain medicine. Studies have found that people stopped taking the pills because of muscle aches even when they were taking a placebo. A strong predictor of if you'll experience muscle aches when taking statins could be whether you read about the potential side effect.

Very rarely, statins can cause life-threatening muscle damage called rhabdomyolysis (rab-doe-my-OL-ih-sis). Rhabdomyolysis can cause extreme muscle pain, liver damage, kidney failure, and death. The risk of very serious side effects is extremely low. Only a few cases of rhabdomyolysis occur per million people taking statins. Rhabdomyolysis can occur when you take statins in combination with certain medicines or if you take a high dose of statins.