Statins, widely used cholesterol-lowering drugs, have been blamed for memory loss, but a new study suggests that the association is an illusion.
The report, "Statin Therapy and Risk of Acute Memory Impairment," published online June 8 by JAMA Internal Medicine, found that the apparent association was likely a result of detection bias -- visiting the doctor and starting a new medicine makes people more acutely aware of health issues they might otherwise not notice.
Using a large database collected from 1987 to 2013, researchers compared 482,543 statin users with the same number of people using no lipid-lowering drugs and with 26,484 people using other lipid-lowering drugs that were not statins.
Use of statin drugs was associated with an increase in memory loss during the first 30 days of starting the drugs compared with people who did not take cholesterol-lowering drugs. But so was use of nonstatin lipid-lowering drugs.
After accounting for many health and behavioral variables, the scientists concluded that either all lipid-lowering drugs, statins or not, cause memory loss or, more likely, that earlier findings were based on "detection bias" -- the expectations of the patients rather than any physiological effect of the medicine. The idea behind detection bias is that when patients begin taking a new medication, they are wisely are on guard against adverse reactions and so tend to notice and report pre-existing problems as though they were new.
Celia Storey added some information to this report.
ActiveStyle on 07/27/2015