Statins are also prescribed after heart operations such as angioplasties.
When I had my angioplasty performed, there were 22 people (including myself) being operated on that day. That's in just one hospital in the UK. Which means that the hospital in question performed 8,030 angioplasty operations in a single year, if that figure of 22 people is a typical average. Multiply that by the number of hospitals with cardiac surgery units in the UK, and you're into six figures with ease in just one year. If you assume by hypothesis that, say, 100,000 such operations are performed each year, and multiply that by the number of years during which combined angioplasty/post-operative statin prescriptions have been deployed, that's easily over a million people, and the number is growing. Multiply that by similar figures over the developed world, and we're probably looking at 80 million people worldwide taking statins.
Now, my understanding is that a drug only moves off-patent and becomes a generic drug, able to be manufactured without licence and royalties to the original company inventing the drug, after 20 years have elapsed. Atorvastatin has been a generic drug ever since I started taking it, which means that it has been in circulation for revascularisation treatment for 25 years or more. Over that time, while it was still on-patent, it earned the parent company a whopping $125 billion in global sales over that 20 year patent period, and over that patent period, was the world's best-selling medication.
Plus, here in the UK, some tabloid newspapers were publishing front page articles on statins for years. One or two still are.
With that level of widespread clinical use, I contend that the word 'statin' indeed belongs in the common words list.
