Statin snag

Science News, August 16, 2008 by Nathan Seppa

Cholesterol-reducing drugs called statins do their job with remarkable efficiency, but in rare cases they can cause serious muscle pain, called myopathy. In the August 21 New England Journal of Medicine, researchers will report the discovery of a variant in the gene SLCO1B1 that places people at risk.

The variant prevents a protein from shuttling compounds, including statins, from the bloodstream into the liver for processing, says study coauthor Rory Collins of the University of Oxford in England.