Total Health Breakthroughs: Free Natural Health Newsletter and Alternative Health Articles

I was recently made aware of huge news on statin drugs from the labs at Iowa State University, where a researcher has confirmed something I have long suspected regarding cholesterol-lowering drugs — that they could seriously harm brain health.

The concern comes from simply knowing that brain cells, like liver cells, also manufacture cholesterol. Brain cells need cholesterol for a variety of functions. For instance, cholesterol is a primary component of the protective nerve coating called myelin. If your brain cells didn’t need cholesterol, they wouldn’t make it.

In the past it was assumed that statins primarily affect the production of cholesterol in the liver. However, as a pharmacist I have always thought it was naïve to think that a drug (statins) that circulates throughout the whole body would not affect other cholesterol-producing cells at all. My fears have now been proven correct.

Yeon-Kyun Shin, a biophysics professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology at Iowa State, says his research shows that statins do indeed slow the production of cholesterol in the brain which then interferes with efficient brain function.¹ His study will soon be published in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences.

Shin found that too little cholesterol in brain cells significantly affected a protein that is needed for the release of neurotransmitters. Cholesterol is needed to change the shape of this critical protein, and in his words, “to stimulate thinking and memory.”

I cannot overstate how important this information is, and how big a ripple this news will cause as it is more widely reported. At least, I hope it will be widely reported.

By now we are all familiar with the class of cholesterol lowering drugs called statins. A recent study, which was actually looking to see if statins cause liver toxicity, found that not only were statins clearly correlated with increased liver enzymes, they were also associated with increased cancer risk.¹

Another trial was looking to find out if a newer combination drug for cholesterol lowering, called Vytorin, could prevent the progression of aortic heart-valve disease– they found out it did not. Other findings from the study were a mixed bag of good and bad, but of great concern was that more people taking the drug ended up getting cancer, compared to those on placebo — 40% more.²

A re-analysis of the data from some of these trials was done to see if the cholesterol lowering drugs really did increase cancer risk or if that occurred by chance — the authors came away convinced the increased cancer risk was a fluke. Interestingly though, a group of editors of the New England Journal of Medicine said in effect, “Not so fast,” because they calculated that the odds that this finding was just by chance could be as low as 7 in 1000.³

In the meantime, another study has suggested that it may not be the drugs that are increasing the cancer risk, but the low LDL levels (LDL is considered the “bad” type of cholesterol). This study followed Chinese patients with type II diabetes who had no previous history of cancer. Those with an LDL level of 107 had a 33% increased risk of cancer and death, and those with an LDL level of 87 had a 50% increased risk.⁴As the LDL decreased, cancer risk increased. It will be awhile before the issue is completely sorted out, and I am glad to see that at least some experts are concerned by these results.

But even with the increased risks, most of these researchers and medical organizations such as the American College of Cardiology are not suggesting that people who are on statins to manage heart disease stop taking them.⁵ Why? Because heart disease is a more immediate threat.