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 "It’s a completely false alarm that doesn’t look like it’s real and
shouldn’t enter into the equation of whether or not someone should
take their statins," said Dr. Brian Strom of Rutgers University in
Newark, New Jersey.
Previous reports and studies suggested memory problems may be tied
to statins, which are a popular class of cholesterol-lowering
medications, Strom and his colleagues write in JAMA Internal
Medicine.
Statins are one of the most commonly prescribed drugs. They lower
LDL or "bad" cholesterol, and ultimately prevent cardiovascular
problems like heart attacks and strokes.
For the new study, the researchers used 1987-2013 medical record
data from the U.K. on more than 482,500 people not taking any drugs
to lower their cholesterol, a similar number of people who were
taking statins and nearly 26,500 people who were taking other types
of cholesterol-lowering medications.
The researchers checked the records to see whether people in the
study had told their doctors about short-term memory loss.
Overall, 0.08 percent of statin users had some sort of memory
problem noted in their medical record within 30 days after starting
statins, compared to 0.02 percent of those not taking
cholesterol-lowering medications.
But when the researchers compared people taking other kinds of
cholesterol-lowering medications to those not taking any such drugs
at all, they found a similar pattern.
"To our surprise, we found the same thing – also a four-fold
increased risk" for people using the other drugs, Strom told Reuters
Health. "When you look at the two together" - statins and other
cholesterol medications - "you see no difference."
After conducting other comparisons, the researchers believe the
increase in short-term memory problems is probably related to what's
known as a detection bias.
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"People who forget their keys may forget their keys either way, but
if they’re on a new drug they’re going to blame it on the new drug,"
Strom said. He added that the two types of cholesterol-lowering
drugs work in very different ways.
"It’s hard to say there is truly a cause and effect that statin
drugs affect memory," said Dr. David Frid, a staff cardiologist at
the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
The benefits of statins are well recorded, and people should talk
with their doctors if they feel they're experiencing significant
memory loss after starting a medication, said Frid, who was not
involved in the new study.
"The risk here of a short term memory loss should not enter into the
equation of whether or not people should take a statin," Strom said.
"All drugs have risk," he said. "People should not think drug are
completely safe. It doesn’t matter if you're talking about
prescriptions, over-the-counter drugs or herbal drugs."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1drhNL7 JAMA Internal Medicine, online June 8,
2015.
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