Should You Be Taking a Statin? What to Know About the Common Medication

New guidelines highlight the importance of treating high cholesterol earlier and cover who benefits from taking a statin

Meghan Holohan,

AARP

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Published May 01, 2026

Illustration of an artery showing red blood cells flowing past yellow plaque buildup on the vessel walls.

Chris Gash

Key takeaways

New guidelines call for doctors to treat high cholesterol sooner to prevent health risks like heart attack and stroke.
Statins are a common type of prescription medication that can lower your cholesterol and reduce cardiovascular risks.
Talk to your doctor about cholesterol-lowering medications and tests that can reveal your risk of developing atherosclerosis.

Recently, nearly a dozen leading medical associations — including the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology— issued updated guidelines for managing cholesterol. The biggest change? Doctors should start treatment for high LDL cholesterol, including prescribing statins, sooner than they have in the past.

Experts say there is growing evidence that years of high cholesterol can increase a person’s chance of serious heart troubles. And keeping your LDL cholesterol lower for longer “results in much greater protection against future heart attack and stroke risk,” Dr. Roger Blumenthal, director of the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease and chair of the guideline writing committee, said in a statement.

“The absolute risk of heart attack or stroke goes up as we age,” Blumenthal told AARP. “It’s always better to use this type of cholesterol-lowering medicine before a person has developed a lot of plaque in their arteries.”

What is cholesterol?

Cholesterol is a waxy, fatlike substance that the body needs to carry out important duties such as building cells and producing hormones.

“We need cholesterol for our day-to-day functions,” says Dr. Paul Leis, a cardiologist at Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital in New York City. “It helps coat the neurons so that our nerve cells work.”

The body makes cholesterol; people also get it from eating foods such as dairy, poultry and meat.

There are two main types of cholesterol: LDL, which is considered “bad” cholesterol, and HDL, which is considered “good.”

The new guidelines, published March 13 in the journal Circulation, address how to manage elevated LDL cholesterol, since having too much LDL can lead to a buildup of plaque in the arteries and contribute to heart troubles.

“That’s where the atherosclerotic disease comes from,” Leis says, referring to a hardening of the arteries caused by plaque buildup. “You can begin to develop plaque in the arteries of your heart. You can begin to develop plaque in the arteries of your neck, in the arteries of your legs. It puts you at risk of stroke.”

To avoid this, doctors recommend keeping LDL levels under 100 mg/dL.

HDL is nicknamed the “good” cholesterol because it helps remove other forms of cholesterol from the bloodstream.

What are statins?

Since 1987 doctors have been prescribing a class of drugs called statins, which reduce cholesterol levels in the body through two different mechanisms, Blumenthal explains.

First, the medication decreases cholesterol production in the liver. And when the liver notices it’s making less cholesterol, it creates receptors that eliminate cholesterol in the blood, Blumenthal adds.

Most people who take statins will see their cholesterol levels dip. But in some cases people experience side effects, such as muscle pain, slightly increased blood sugar and some liver dysfunction, Leis says.

“About 94 out of 100 people have absolutely no trouble taking a statin. But six out of 100 people might stop in the first year,” Blumenthal says. However, he adds, many people who experience side effects from their statin can tolerate switching to a lower dose or a different statin.

For those who can’t handle statins, there are other medications that help lower LDL, such as cholesterol absorption inhibitors and PCSK9 inhibitors, according to the Mayo Clinic. In some cases people might need to take several medications to improve their cholesterol.

“We try to formulate the best-tolerated medicines to get to the LDL that we need,” Leis says.

The importance of managing cholesterol as you age

While the new guidelines encourage doctors to test and treat high cholesterol earlier in life, managing cholesterol remains crucial for people 50 and older. That’s because the risk of experiencing a heart attack or stroke increases in middle age.

Aging “does increase the risk because that’s more time of exposure to high cholesterol,” Leis says.

Women in perimenopause and menopause also need to be mindful of their LDL levels — even if they’ve never experienced high cholesterol before.

“As women go through menopause, their estrogen levels that are circulating in their body decrease,” Blumenthal says. “That may be one of the main causes of why the LDL cholesterol may increase a mild to moderate amount.”

If high cholesterol has started damaging the cardiovascular system, doctors still want people to take statins and other cholesterol-lowering drugs to treat it.

“When someone’s known to have atherosclerosis or heart disease or hardening of the arteries, we want to be aggressive,” Blumenthal says. “We’d rather not wait until someone’s already had a heart attack or stroke to think about lowering their risk and treating their high cholesterol.”

People who have had bypass surgery, a heart attack or angioplasty — a procedure to widen narrowed arteries — can also improve their health by taking a statin.

“They would benefit from aggressive cholesterol lowering and certainly getting the LDLs below 70, and in some cases aiming to get it down lower, below 55,” Blumenthal says. “It is more important to think about things earlier on to prevent problems.”

Talk to your doctor

People who need cholesterol-lowering drugs should ask their clinicians about other factors that put them at increased risk of developing atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

These include:

Coming from a family with a history of early heart disease
Having persistently high triglycerides or LDL cholesterol
Being South Asian or Filipino
Having past reproductive risk factors, such as preeclampsia, gestational diabetes or hypertension that develops during pregnancy

“All of these historical factors should be taken into account because they increase a person’s long-term risk” of heart issues, Blumenthal says.

Patients should also ask for a lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)] test, which will help them determine the likelihood that they’ll develop atherosclerosis, the hardening of artery walls.

For the Lp(a) test, “the new guidelines say to check at least once in a patient’s lifetime,” Leis says.

Having a score of 250 nanomoles per liter of Lp(a) is “associated with about a doubling of a person’s estimated risk,” Blumenthal adds. Knowing this can help doctors determine when to intervene by prescribing lifestyle changes, such as diet or exercise, or statins.

Another test to consider is a coronary artery calcium scan, which is a low-radiation CT scan that can show whether patients are at high risk for future heart problems, Blumenthal says.

“If someone has statin hesitation and they’re at intermediate risk, there are imaging modalities that can be used as a tiebreaker,” Leis says. “The name of the game is to find plaque early and treat it from becoming worse, or treat the cholesterol to prevent plaque from forming in the first place.”

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Meghan Holohan is an award-winning health journalist. Her work has appeared on Today.com and NBC News and in Salon, Mental Floss and other publications.