Do statins really age you faster?

On Sunday the Express front page warned us that 'statins age you faster'. But what does the research really show?

A lot of people are on statins. The British Heart Foundation state on their website that they are the most commonly prescribed drug in the UK. They're taken predominately by middle aged men, some who have already suffered heart problems, and some who haven't but fit in to an 'at risk' category that predicts cardiovascular disease. But there are often scare stories around statins (I've written about this before), perhaps because they're so widely prescribed, so it can be hard to work out what's really known, or not known about them.

On Sunday, the Express' front page claimed that 'Statins age you faster'. The study it was referring to was published in July this year in the journal Cell Physiology. The research involved taking fat tissue biopsies from healthy people and extracting stem cells, and then exposing the stem cell samples to one of two types of statin. Stem cells are special cells that are found in fat tissue (and various other tissues), that can differentiate in to a variety of other specific types of cells, and are involved in tissue repair in adults.