Four million more Britons may need to take statins, says health tsar

Professor Roger Boyle, the Government's national director for heart disease, said the checks announced by Health Secretary Alan Johnson yesterday were likely to boost prescriptions for statins.

The scheme means people aged 40 to 74 will be offered health checks with the aim of saving 2,000 lives a year in England.

Four million men and women could be screened every year for major conditions as part of the programme, estimated to cost £250million annually.

And with three million people in England already taking statins - costing the NHS £500m a year - the cost could rise to £1.16billion with the extra prescriptions.

Professor Roger Boyle told the Investigation programme on Radio 4 that the plan to offer mass screening would also radically alter the amount of people taking statins.

He said: "The number could at least double from roughly three million at the moment taking statin drugs to certainly six or seven million people."

Statins work to cut levels of bad cholesterol and help protect against heart disease.

Most of the patients given statins as a direct result of the health checks will be doing so as a preventative measure to avoid heart disease.

Prof Boyle admitted to the BBC that clinical studies have shown 99 per cent of this group will gain no benefit from taking the drug.

But the 1 per cent who do benefit will still translate into tens of thousands of people, he said.

A "vascular check-up" to detect risk of heart disease and stroke will be offered, with patients undergoing further tests for diabetes and kidney disease if they are thought to be at risk of those conditions.

GP practices, community health centres and pharmacies are all likely to offer the tests, which will be rolled out from 2009/10.

Dr Peter Trewby, a consultant physician at Darlington Hospital who has studied how willing patients are to take preventative medicines like statins, told the BBC too many statins were already prescribed.

"We are turning healthy people into patients, we are medicalising people and making them worry about their health unnecessarily," he said.

"I would take a statin if I had a heart attack but I certainly wouldn't take on otherwise."

The Investigation will be broadcast tomorrow night at 8pm on Radio 4.