The American Medical Association says 700 Americans each year have their gallbladders removed, but research featured recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association seems to show long-term use of statins could cut the risk of developing gallstones, even though the cholesterol-controlling drugs actually do their work in the liver.

Bodmer: "In doing so, they reduce cholesterol formation in (the) liver, and this transforms to lower blood levels of cholesterol, but maybe also of lower levels in the gallbladder."

Dr. Michael Bodmer and his colleagues at University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland studied patients from the United Kingdom over a 14-year period, comparing those who'd had their gallbladders removed to those who hadn't, and looked at the number of patients in each group who took statins for other problems.

Bodmer: "What we found primarily in our study was that long-term users of statins may, or probably have, decreased risk of having had the gallbladder removed."