Statins & Memory Loss Link Debunked, Study Finds Statins Unlikely to be Sole Culprit of Memory Issues

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A new study has shown that use of statins does not cause acute memory loss.

Acute memory loss is the most common side effect of taking cholesterol-lowering drug statins, but according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, it may not be the case.

For the study, lead researcher Dr. Brian Strom, from Rutgers University, and his colleagues compared statin users from two groups of non-statin users and non-statin LLD users.

Compared with 482,542 statin users, 26,484 non-statin LLD users and 482,543 control users, the researchers found that both groups who use cholesterol-lowering drugs appeared to have short-term memory loss in the first month of their medication compared to the control group.

"These are drugs that work by completely different mechanisms, and it's not biologically plausible that they'd have the same effects," Dr. Strom told CBS News.

In conclusion, researchers said statins do not cause memory loss and the problem was due to detection bias.

"People have memory problems all the time," Dr. Strom explained. "You lose your keys. You forget somebody's name. When you get put on a new drug you're more likely to blame it on the drug you just took."

Instead, statins do the opposite. In fact, they improve long-term memory and can prevent heart disease.

Dr. Strom said statins are effective for preventing vascular disease. "They are remarkably safe and people should not be reluctant to use them because they fear of possible short-term memory loss," he added.

Strom and his colleagues also looked at patients who occasionally took statins because of short-term memory issues. After they were prescribed with statins again at a later date, the patients did not complain of memory loss.

"If the memory problems were real, we would expect that those who took statins for the second time would develop memory problems again," Strom said, according to Time. "The fact that we saw this as a problem so infrequently in this group suggests that it was more because the statins were a new drug the first time around."

Dr. Strom noted that short-term memory problems may not even be an effect of the drug.

"This whole issue of short-term memory loss with statins is really a tempest in a teapot," he said, per MedPage Today. He adds that statins are effective at lowering cholesterol and there have been evidence that long-term use could help improve memory. Patients should not discontinue taking them in fear of memory loss issues.