The tool, July 3 -- For years, the fear of muscle pain and weakness has kept millions of patients from taking statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs that cardiologists consider among the most effective tools in preventing heart attacks and strokes. A new calculator developed at the University of Oxford now offers what clinical medicine has never provided for those patients: a personal estimate of their actual risk, derived from the health records of 5.6 million people in England.

for more than 98 per cent of patients considered eligible for statin therapy, that risk is minimal.

Dr. Ting Cai, the study's lead author and a researcher in Oxford's Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, said the gap between perceived and actua...