Historically statins first came out by Merck company, to address an uncommon genetic defect where people have huge elevated cholesterols (familial hypercholesteremia). I only know of one person in fact...in my 40+ yrs working who had this... a level of 800! Once the drug was on the market they decided to target others. So studies were done, and the first one by Dr. Keyes the data was altered by removing results that didn't fit their hypothesis. (this is explained and the data shown in the book The Cholesterol Myths). Merck also knew about losing CoQ-10... and they initially thought :
1) people won't take this if they know it damages CoQ-10 synthesis etc sooooo we won't tell doctors or patients.
2) they patented a tablet with both Lovastatin (Mevacor) + CoQ-10 in it. The patent can still be accessed online in fact. But the solubility factor of CoQ-10 could not be solved quickly so they dropped the combo product....and kept the secret. This information came out about 8-10 yrs ago, but many doctors still do not know or understand even what CoQ-10 is for!

As the complementary aspect of medicine grew and people became more interested in things and the internet grew, all this came out. Now you can find information about CoQ-10 loss and statins if you look for it. But most doctors don't look for it and hence unless a patient tells them---NOTHING is shared.

Big Pharma tends to sit on negative or disturbing data, and only release positive things --which can often have been even ghost written, fraudent, or data manipulated. Merck for example even published a fake medical journal in Australia, with fake papers to promote their drugs!

So being in that occupation, seeing everyone on drugs everyday, I became very upset, and determined to share the truth and facts not supplied to doctors. (once a drug goes off patent, salespeople do not advise doctors anymore so they are then totally out of the loop in all ways).

The bottom line is that the "goals" for statins, that everyone now believes, were fabricated and created by Big Pharma to sell their drugs...which were blockbusters and made BILLIONS for them.
This is my statin thread here...

http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/post665830-5.html
I have many other posts scattered on NeuroTalk here with more links...if you search "statins" you'll find them.

Not everyone gets PN from statins. But a study in the Netherlands claims many more do than reported. Basically statins damage the cells' ability to repair damage. This happens in the brain, like the memory damage. This was found when MS patients were given high dose statins in the hopes of staving off MS damage, and in reality this caused them FURTHER damage so they don't do this treatment anymore.

Doctors do not know the other side of this subject, so I provide the information gathered by reputable independent researchers so people reading here can study it and decide for themselves.

If you had cholesterols really high --over 300-350 or more, then yes you may need some help. But you don't need 40mg IMO.
You could get by with much less, according to Dr. Jay Cohen MD who I link to very often.