The authors of two papers published by the British Medical Journal have publicly retracted statements they made about the frequency of side effects experienced by people taking statins, following a charge by an Oxford professor that the information was wrong and could endanger lives.

Prof Sir Rory Collins told the Guardian in March that a paper and a subsequent article in the BMJ were inaccurate and misleading. They had claimed that 18%-20% of people on the cholesterol-reducing drugs suffered adverse events. Collins called on the BMJ to withdraw them and complained that the authors were creating unease and uncertainty in British patients prescribed statins in large numbers to protect them against heart attacks and stroke.

“It is a serious disservice to British and international medicine,” Collins told the Guardian at the time, claiming that the alarm caused was probably killing more people than had been harmed as a result of the paper on the MMR vaccine by Andrew Wakefield. “I would think the papers on statins are far worse in terms of the harm they have done.”

The paper, by John Abramson and colleagues, questioned the decision to extend statins to thousands of people at low risk of heart attacks and strokes, saying that the drugs had not been proven to save lives in that group. They also claimed that an observational study had shown that 18%-20% suffer side effects from statins. An article by cardiologist Aseem Malhotra published the same week repeated the figure. Both authors have now withdrawn that statement.

In an editorial published in the BMJ, author Dr Fiona Godlee said the error was due to a misreading of the data from the study and was not picked up by the peer review process. “The BMJ and the authors of both these articles have now been made aware that this figure is incorrect, and corrections have been published withdrawing these statements,” she writes.