Nearly every man and most women over 55 should take cholesterol lowering drugs, according to new US guidelines, stirring fresh controversy in the medical world.
If applied to a group of 5000 otherwise healthy people over that age in the Netherlands, 96 per cent of men and two thirds of women could be prescribed some sort of statin, said the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
That is far more than would be allocated under European guidelines, raising new questions about how popular drugs like Lipitor (atorvastatin) and Zocor (simvastatin) are prescribed, why, and to whom.
Issued in November, the new US guidelines call for more adults without heart disease to consider taking the medications in order to prevent future health problems - namely adults with a 7.5 per cent or higher risk of a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years.
In 2002, the federal guidelines said statins should only be taken by people if they had a higher than 20 per cent risk of heart disease in the coming decade.
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At a jam-packed session of the American College of Cardiology meeting on Saturday, doctors insisted that America is not trying to "statinise" the world.
"No. This is conversation-starting material," Sanjay Kaul, a leading cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai told a room full of colleagues as he and other panelists fielded questions about how to prescribe statins to patients at varying levels of risk.
"I think we need to remind ourselves we should not treat these as iron-clad rules. These are guides."
Statins can help prevent heart disease by lowering cholesterol in the blood and keeping the heart and arteries free of plaque build-up that can lead to stroke or heart attack.
Currently, some 25 million people in the US take statins.
The new American Heart Association guidelines mean 56 million people in the country may be candidates for the drug therapy, up from 43 million under the previous 2001 guidelines, according to research published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers in The Netherlands reported that aside from almost every man, 66 per cent of women in the Rotterdam study would be urged to take a statin according to US guidelines.
The most serious side effect of statins is diabetes, though some people also report muscle weakness, weight gain and memory loss.
Earlier this week, researchers said statins may also have the beneficial side effect of helping fight erectile dysfunction in older men.
