Researchers at Imperial College London ran a trial giving 60 such patients months of statin pills, months of placebo pills, and months of no pills at all, with statin and placebo months blinded, and asked them to rate their symptoms throughout.
Frances Wood and Darrel Francis's team found that symptom intensity was about the same whether patients were taking the statin or the placebo, both far higher than during the no-pill months, meaning about 90 percent of the symptom burden patients had blamed on the drug showed up just as strongly with a sugar pill.
The effect is known as a nocebo response, where expecting a side effect helps produce it, and the trial's one-month rotating design let each patient serve as their own comparison. After seeing their own results laid out, half the patients who had quit statins over side effects chose to restart, having learned the pills were not the main source of their symptoms.
Read the original study
The side effect came from the fear of it.
Source
- Wood, F. A., Howard, J. P., Finegold, J. A., Nowbar, A. N., Thompson, D. M., Arnold, A. D., Rajkumar, C. A., Connolly, S., Cegla, J., Stride, C., Sever, P., Norton, C., Thom, S. A., Shun-Shin, M. J., & Francis, D. P. (2020). N-of-1 Trial of a Statin, Placebo, or No Treatment to Assess Side Effects. New England Journal of Medicine, 383(22), 2182–2184. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmc2031173