LONDON, July 3 -- The fear is familiar to almost any cardiologist. A patient with elevated cholesterol or a recent cardiac event gets a statin prescription and, weeks later, calls to say they have stopped taking it. Muscle pain, they explain. Or the possibility of it. Something they read online, something a neighbor mentioned. For the tens of millions of people who might benefit from statins but have never started, or started and stopped, a large study from the University of Oxford offers a direct answer to that fear.

Serious muscle disorders, specifically the kind requiring hospitalization or in rare cases proving fatal, affect fewer than two in every hundred people eligible for statin therapy over a ten-year period, according to Scienc...