On my Facebook page I’ve shared a couple of articles cautioning against the use of statins because of their effect on brain health. I received a comment that suggested statins might actually decrease the risk of dementia. From what I know about brain chemistry this was surprising to me and I’ve checked into this further. Here’s why I’m still down on statins in regards to brain health.
The main benefits of statins are lowering cholesterol and inflammation. The main side effect of statins have been muscle weakness and increased blood sugar, leading to diabetes for some. The blood sugar and diabetes side effects are unqualifiably bad for brain health, but only for some people and hopefully a doctor would screen out the people for whom this is a risk.
There’s no getting around that inflammation is bad for everyone, all the time, including for brain health. To this extent statins can provide a benefit to brain health. Yet most people COULD control this through diet, even though most people DON’T. Though statins do indeed help in this manner they are an artificial, expensive (and profitable!) solution to what most people (but not all) could accomplish naturally with proper diet and exercise.
For all people statins affect cholesterol, once again that is the point. Ah, but the impact of statins in this case is more of a mixed bag, as indeed is the impact of cholesterol itself. Lowering cholesterol is better news for the heart than for the brain, which consists of more fat tissue than the heart. In the brain cholesterol is needed for facilitating connections between neurons and protecting those neurons. Thus for general brain chemistry statins interfere to a certain extent with what the brain needs to function.
Yet the brain involves complicated pathways, part of the reason diseases like Alzheimer’s have been so hard to tackle. On the one hand some studies (not many, but they get well publicized because of what’s involved) have shown that cholesterol may be contributing to the formation of protein plaques. In such cases the effect of statins on cholesterol would decrease the risk of dementia. On the other hand statins interfere with the production of a helpful antioxidant the body produces to combat free radicals that are a byproduct of mitochondrial activity. Since the brain is a high energy machine this impact of statins is harmful, at least for some individuals.
Here is an article that elaborates upon what I summed up: It’s Not Dementia, It’s Your Heart Medication: Cholesterol Drugs and Memory. No doubt that statins have saved lives, yet I remain a skeptic because the right diet and exercise provides the same benefit as statins for most people (though not all, granted), without ANY side effects. However, unlike diet and exercise, they also provide a tidy profit. Our economic system tends to err on the side of profit, while people tend to err on the side of ease. Taking statins for heart problems is easier than diet and exercise, yet be skeptical of claims benefiting brain health and get more than one doctor’s opinion before taking statins.
