I have been taking Simvastatin (20mg/day) for several years. I've been having some hip pains recently and had not connected that to my Simvastatin regimen. So, thanks, Rap, for making that connection. I will definitely look into it. Before I started taking Simvastatin I was self-medicating with red yeast rice, which is the organic compound from which the statin drugs are derived. Maybe I will just go back to that, along with fish oil and niacin.
As for the diabetes risk, a lot of the same factors that would cause someone to take statin drugs would also lead to diabetes, so I am skeptical that the statin drugs led to increased diabetes risk. It seems more likely that there were other common variables involved. People with high cholesterol are also more likely to have many of the risk factors for diabetes. I am certain the researchers controlled for a lot of that, but the multicollinearity between heart disease and diabetes is so high, it seems to me that the researchers could easily miss a variable that would account for something as small as a 10-20 percent increased risk factor.