HOW statin drugs damage your brain....

Today's post: Friday, 7-25-2008

(Yesterday’s post was on other reasons to be very wary of taking statin drugs.)

Today I got an email from Newsmax.com with an article called, Statins May Spur Dementia, written by Sylvia Booth Hubbard

Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center have found that the “glial progenitor cells,” which your brain uses to change and customize the different kinds of cells it needs to keep working right, to change and become a kind of different cell your brain can no longer use to do this.

(Other studies have found that glial cells help your brain grow new cells and connections when you learn new things.)

They found that an enzyme that statins target to lower cholesterol interferes with the normal development of glial progenitor cells.

The researchers experimented with cultures of human brain cells & found that that after adding statin drugs, the glial progenitor cells turned mostly into a type of cell called an “oligodendrocyte.”

The article pointed out that you may need the rebuilding that your glial progenitor cells due to events such as a blow to the head, a stroke, etc. They found that statin drugs tend to deplete the availability of progenitor cells. That could pose a problem if these things happened to you.

However, from what I’ve read, glial cells are a good bit more important to the normal working of your brain than this point suggests.

It was once thought that only babies and toddlers grew new brain cells in response to new information and learning. Recently, researchers at the University of California, at Berkeley where the research on this effect was done for very young people found that it goes on all your life, even for people well over 65 years old.

Glial cells act like the general contractor or building supply department for your brain that does this function.

Dr Graveline, who we spoke of yesterday, found that 40 percent of the side effects from statin drugs are cognitive and, in addition to the temporary but near total amnesia he experienced, he reports that nearly permanent destruction of short term memory has sometimes resulted.

So, at worst, this effect can clearly result in mental incompetence or effective senility by itself and, according to Dr Graveline, has done so.

The researchers University of Rochester Medical Center also speculated that even when the effect just from statins in not that strong, the effect they found would tend to make any other kind of mental decline or senility a person might have worse.

As we posted about yesterday, the benefits statins are prescribed to produce can be gotten in most cases without using them. In fact, by addressing more factors than lowering LDL cholesterol and lowering LDL cholesterol in other ways, you can get much BETTER protection from heart attacks without using statin drugs.

Why run the risk of taking something that produces such effects?

Sure, you might be someone who is immune to these effects or in whom they are unusually mild for some reason.

But why run the risk of taking statin drugs when you could be one of the people in whom these effects are severe, when it’s NOT necessary to protect your heart?