LIFESTAT – Living with statins: An interdisciplinary project on the use of statins as a cholesterol-lowering treatment and for cardiovascular risk reduction

Aim: LIFESTAT is an interdisciplinary project that leverages approaches and knowledge from medicine, the humanities and the social sciences to analyze the impact of statin use on health, lifestyle and well-being in cohorts of Danish citizens. The impetus for the study is the fact that 10% of the population in the Scandinavian countries are treated with statins in order to maintain good health and to avoid cardiovascular disease by counteracting high blood levels of cholesterol. The potential benefit of treatment with statins should be considered in light of evidence that statin use has prevalent and unintended side effects (e.g. myalgia, and glucose and exercise intolerance). Methods: The LIFESTAT project combines invasive human experiments, biomedical analyses, nationwide surveys, epidemiological studies, qualitative interviews, media content analyses, and ethnographic participant observations. The study investigates the biological consequences of statin treatment; determines the mechanism(s) by which statin use causes muscle and mitochondrial dysfunction; and analyzes achievement of treatment goals, people’s perception of disease risk, media influence on people’s risk and health perception, and the way people manage to live with the risk (personally, socially and technologically). Conclusions: The originality and success of LIFESTAT depend on and derive from its interdisciplinary approach, in which the disciplines converge into thorough and holistic study and describe the impact of statin use on the everyday life of statin users. This has the potential for much greater benefit than any one of the disciplines alone. Integrating traditional disciplines provides novel perspectives on potential current and future social, medical and personal benefits of statin use.