Social media posts about statins: Sorting fact from fiction

As a class of drugs, statins are among the best researched medications in the history of pharmaceuticals. These safe, inexpensive, generic drugs lower harmful LDL cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes (see “What are statins?”). But on social media sites like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, statins are frequently portrayed as dangerous, with posts and comments that overemphasize side effects and understate their benefits.

More than 75% of Americans use social media, which has become a popular source of health information — a trend that’s especially troubling to cardiologists. According to an article in the December 2025 issue of The American Journal of Preventive Cardiology, misinformation about statins is a major threat to public health. When people who are good candidates for statins avoid or stop taking them, they’re more vulnerable to disabling or fatal heart attacks.

“Social media posts about statin side effects are often dominated by anecdotal experiences and sometimes invalid information,” says Dr. Jorge Plutzky, director of preventive cardiology at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. People sometimes describe crippling muscle aches or memory problems and express fears about diabetes associated with taking statins. One reason these posts gain traction is simply a function of how social media works. “Repeating well-established information that statins are safe and protective gets little attention. Sharing adverse experiences drives much more interest,” says Dr. Plutzky. But what does the evidence show about the prevalence and severity of statin side effects?

Muscle aches: Real or imagined?

The muscle aches, soreness, or weakness that people may experience when taking statins are referred to as statin-associated myalgias. In many large studies of people who are randomly assigned to take a statin or a placebo (but don’t know which one), about 5% to 12% of people in both groups report muscle-related side effects. But in observational studies and in real-world settings (clinics and doctors' practices), the proportion of people taking statins who say they have muscle aches or pains ranges from 10% to as high as 29%.

One likely explanation is the nocebo effect — the flip side of the well-known placebo effect: people experience and report symptoms because they expect to have them. A 2020 study in The New England Journal of Medicine tested this in people who’d previously taken statins but stopped due to bothersome (but not dangerous) side effects. They were given unmarked prescription bottles containing a statin, a lookalike fake pill, or no medication, which they then used for a month at a time in a random sequence. Over the course of a year, people reported muscle-related symptoms at about the same rate whether they took a statin or the placebo.

“People often start taking statins in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, which is also when aches and pains become more common, often from obesity, arthritis, or just aging,” says Dr. Plutzky. Also, when younger people with genetic conditions that cause extremely high cholesterol and early heart attacks take statins, they rarely mention the side effects that older people describe, he adds.

Other possible statin side effects

Problems like memory loss and brain fog are other complaints often blamed on statins. Like muscle aches, cognitive issues become more prevalent with age, affecting about one in 10 people ages 60 and older. But a large study published in 2021 found no evidence for a link between statins and cognitive problems. In fact, a 2025 analysis of data from 55 previous studies suggested that statin users have a lower risk of both Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia than people who don’t take statins.

Taking statins (especially at higher doses) can modestly raise blood sugar levels and seems to increase the risk for diabetes by about 7% to 12%. But in large clinical trials, people taking statins who developed diabetes — a major risk factor for heart disease — still experienced fewer heart attacks. As a result, diabetes and cardiovascular treatment guidelines uniformly recommend statins for all people ages 40 to 75 who have diabetes.

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