The anti-cholesterol medications called statins are among the most well-studied drugs. They have significant benefits for cardiovascular disease and have been studied in clinical trials for the way they fight cancer, organ rejection — even dementia.

Now, a new set of guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) could have more Americans than ever taking the drug. The task force is recommending statins for adults ages 40 to 75 who have a single risk factor for cardiovascular disease — and at least a 10-percent risk for a cardiac event in the next 10 years.

Statins are meant to “prevent future disease from occurring,” said one epidemiologist.

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Cardiac events include heart attack and stroke; risk factors include high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, and smoking.

These patients have a “constellation of other factors that place them at a higher risk,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of the task force and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at University of California, San Francisco. Still, she said, these people are asymptomatic and statins are meant to “prevent future disease from occurring,” she told LifeZette.

Statins come with their own side effects. Nearly 43 percent of people who take them claim to experience muscular pain, or myalgias, according to a study published last spring in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Doctors can be skeptical of this pain because it comes without biomarkers (meaning they can’t yet identify a reason for it). But a popular drug called Cerivastatin was pulled from the market after it caused 52 deaths from rhabdomyolysis, a disorder where the muscle fibers disintegrate and cause kidney failure. Other studies have linked high-potency statins to type 2 diabetes.

[lz_bulleted_list title=”How Statins Reduce Your Cholesterol” source=”http://www.healthline.com”]First, statins block the enzyme that creates cholesterol.|Reduced production lowers the amount of cholesterol available in your bloodstream.|Statins then reabsorb existing cholesterol. Your body needs cholesterol to perform certain tasks that include helping you digest food, make hormones, and absorb vitamin D.[/lz_bulleted_list]

“The type 2 diabetes link has been seen with high-potency statins, and it is one of the reasons our recommendation is for low- to moderate-potency statins,” Dr. Bibbins-Domingo said. “We know the lower-potency statins are not linked as clearly to type 2 diabetes risk.” The myalgias are relatively rare, she said, and some patients also report cataracts as another side effect.

For many people, these side effects might be worth the risk if it means dodging serious cardiac events. One in every four people in the U.S. dies from heart disease — about 610,000 people a year. It’s the leading cause of death for both men and women nationwide.

“It is the higher-risk people who are most likely to benefit — and for whom that benefit outweighs the potential harm — that we also were very cognizant of and evaluated in this recommendation,” Dr. Bibbins-Domingo said. For those patients who develop complications, other anti-cholesterol drugs exist. “There are other medications that lower your LDL cholesterol,” she said. “Statin medications are the most widely studied medications, which is why this recommendation has focused on statins because we know most about the benefits and we know most about the harm.”

Related: The Worst Thing for Your Heart

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Other doctors are not as confident that these new recommendations leverage the benefits and the risks in proper balance. “The Grade B recommendation by USPSTF means these medications will now get ‘first dollar’ coverage,” said Dr. Rita Redberg, professor of cardiology at UCSF. This means there will be no out-of-pocket costs, such as copayments or deductibles, for the patients and it could “increase the tendency to overprescribe these medications.”

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“I would like to see more emphasis on advising everyone to follow a healthy lifestyle,” Dr. Redberg said. “[That means] a Mediterranean-style diet with lots of fresh food, fruits and vegetables, regular physical activity such as walking, and not smoking, and less emphasis on measuring cholesterol levels, which leads to [an] emphasis on blood tests and drugs — and not on healthy lifestyle.”