The CTT statin adverse effects paper – Diet and Health Today

In summary

* A paper was published on 5th February 2026 which generated headlines such as “Statins don’t cause most side effects blamed on them.”

* The Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU) is an academic research unit at the University of Oxford. The Cholesterol Treatment Trialist (CTT) group is a collaboration led by researchers from the CTSU and other institutions.

* The paper was the seventh major meta-analysis from the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ (CTT) Collaboration. I have reviewed their previous publications and highlighted examples of disingenuity.

* The CTT Collaboration has been criticised by an independent panel for refusing to share data with other researchers. The latest paper reiterated that data won’t be shared.

* There are many conflicts of interest with Oxford University, the CTSU and individual authors named on the paper and pharmaceutical companies that stand to benefit from this paper.

* There were many issues with the process undertaken in this paper.

– The trials upon which the research was based were presided over by pharmaceutical companies.

– Most of these trials had run-in periods, enabling people who raise adverse effects to be dropped before the trials started.

– Adverse effects were requested from the trial teams, outside the peer-review process.

– Adverse effects were broken down into tiny categories (making findings less likely).

– A statistical process was undertaken (making findings less likely).

– The major harms from statins (diabetes and muscle damage) were omitted from the four findings in this paper – because they had been reported previously.

* Despite the conflicts and issues, demands have been made for “rapid revision” of patient leaflets. The idea that academic-pharmaceutical collaborations can try to buck the regulatory process is deeply troubling.

Introduction

I’ve paused the “How to read a paper” series to cover a paper that has just been published. This was one of those papers that led to my email inbox filling up. On 6th February 2026, we woke to headlines such as this one from Reuters “Statins don’t cause most side effects blamed on them” (Ref 1). I received emails from Australia to Arizona about the media coverage, which emanated from a paper in The Lancet called “Assessment of adverse effects attributed to statin therapy in product labels: a meta-analysis of double-blind randomised controlled trials” (Ref 2).

The authors were listed as the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ (CTT) Collaboration. The Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU) is an academic research unit at the University of Oxford. The Cholesterol Treatment Trialist (CTT) group is a collaboration led by researchers from the CTSU and other institutions. Professor Sir Rory Collins was one of the original co-directors of the CTSU. His bio is on the Oxford University CTSU page (Ref 3). The Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ Collaboration is listed on that page as one of his research groups. Collins is reported in the latest paper as a member of the writing committee and a member of the CTT secretariat. The relevance of those connections will become clearer (although not entirely clear).

This note needs to start with some background to the CTT Collaboration, their work, the CTSU funding, data sharing and more, which fortunately I thoroughly reviewed in December 2025.