If you have used statins, did you experience significant side effects from using them?
I was one of those who experienced a lot of leg muscle pain, very poor sleep patterns and brain fog. So, not an opinion, not a concern, hard fact, anecdotal maybe, but a fact. I stopped taking statins three years ago and although the leg muscle pain has reduced dramatically, there is still some.
I have no way of telling what the long term side effects are, especially as statins prevent the uptake of CoQ10, a fact that even Merck Pharmaceutical recognised in their 1990 patent application to include CoQ10 with the statin. Unfortunately there was no scientific evidence to show that ingested CoQ10 would make up for the CoQ10 missing although in some countries it was prescribed along with the statin.
The fact that statins affect different people in different ways shouldn't be too much of a surprise, it's certainly recognised by the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession. I bet there's a few members of this forum who've heard a GP say something like "let's try some of these and if they don't work . . . . . . . ".
As for whether low cholesterol is what we want, cholesterol being vital for the normal functioning of the body, I'd be very cautious of somebody telling me what level it should be if they were paid by the pharmaceutical industry. British Heart Foundation research suggests that 5.4 is optimum. The graph is here on the forum somewhere.
BTW, do you think that scientific research is more valuable than straw polls? You should investigate how pharmaceutical companies weed out test subjects before clinical trials.