More Data for the Anti-Statin Zeitgeist

As the statin pendulum continues to swing from the good-for-what-ails-you to the good-for-nothing position (read the latest statin criticism here, as picked up by the WSJ Health Blog here), it received an even greater push in the negative direction from a dementia study in this week’s online issue of Neurology. In the 12-year curiously titled Religious Orders Study, an ongoing prospective cross-country study of dementia in more than 900 older Catholic nuns, priests, or brothers, investigators found no association between statin use and cognitive abilities or most Alzheimer’s- or stroke-related postmortem brain findings.

Like results from other longitudinal studies, these data suggest that statins provide no protective benefit against the dementing illness. Stratification of the data indicated that Alzheimer’s disease was just as likely to be associated with more lipophilic statins (meaning statins more likely to cross the blood-brain barrier) as less lipophilic statins. Among those patients who died, statin users were significantly less likely to exhibit clinical dementia at the time of death; however, an acknowledged weakness of the study was the limited statistical power to detect a less-than-robust association between statin use and Alzheimer’s pathology, owing to relatively few statin users among those who died.*

*Statin users in study population = 119 (12.8%); statin users among deceased = 47 (17.9%).