Statins Really Do Reduce the Risk of Alzheimer’s

Millions of people are taking a statin drug – statins are probably the highest-selling medications in the USA. The main purpose is to reduce a person’s low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), but some doctors prescribe them for their apparent ability to slow, or even reverse, atherosclerosis, and hence lower the risks of cardiovascular disease. There have been isolated reports that statin-users are less likely to have Alzheimer’s disease, but prospective controlled studies have so far provided inconsistent results. That has changed, however, with a report from the Netherlands’s Rotterdam Study, just published in the British Medical Journal. Almost 7,000 participants in the Rotterdam Study were followed from baseline in 1990-1993 until 2005, to see which ones developed Alzheimer’s. All their filled prescriptions were searchable in national pharmacy records. Upon each Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the subject was classified as an ‘any user’ or ‘never-user’ of cholesterol-lowering medication; the ‘any users’ were sub-classified into lipophilic statin users, hydrophilic statin users, and takers of non-statin cholesterol-lowering drugs. (Lipophilic means fat-soluble and thus able to cross into the brain; hydrophilic means water-soluble and thus unable to cross the blood-brain barrier.)

There were 582 cases of Alzheimer’s disease over the 9 years. Any statin use (compared to never use of cholesterol lowering drugs) was linked to a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s – 43% less. The findings were the same for both lipophilic and hydrophilic statins. There was no corresponding reduction for the users of non-statin cholesterol lowering drugs.

This study confirms previous positive findings, and answers two questions: is the effect due to a lowering of cholesterol by any means? And, if it’s due to a statin, does the statin have to be lipophilic?

A US pharmaceutical company, Nymox, holds US and global patent rights for the use of statin drugs for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. It seems unlikely that they will make a fortune from this, as many statins are now generics and prescribed widely by doctors without too much attention being paid to the actual indication. As this study shows, ‘any’ statin seems to work in nearly halving the risk of developing Alzheimer’s over the next 9 years, on average. Not a cure for this dread disease, but a preventive step in the right direction. It remains to be seen if physicians start prescribing statins for this purpose, without waiting for FDA approval of the indication . . .