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High cholesterol levels in your blood increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Statins block a substance your body needs to make cholesterol, reducing the amount circulating in your body. Reducing the risk May and her team found that patients who took their statins as prescribed at least 80 percent of the time reduced their risk of having a heart attack or stroke by nearly 50 percent. “People do worse when they don’t take their medication,” she said. “The more patients adhered to their statin regimen, the better that they did. So, if you want to increase your chances of not having another cardiovascular event, then taking the medicine is really important and can help.” The study also found that while 25 percent of people never filled their statin prescription in the first place, a similar number of people didn’t bother to fill their second one. “We really don’t know why people weren’t taking them, mainly because we had no contact with the patients, we didn’t talk to them,” May said. “But we don’t think cost was really an issue because they all had health insunce and statins are pretty inexpensive — I think it’s 5 or 10 dollars for a three-month supply.” The side effects No drug comes without potential side effects, but the most frequent one experienced with statins is reasonably minor compared to the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. “Myopathy, which is muscle weakness, is the most frequently reported complaint, and severe myopathy (rhabdomyolysis) only occurs in about 1 in 10,000 patients,” Dr. Victoria Shin, a cardiologist with Torrance Memorial Medical Center in California, told Healthline.