May 29, 2026

Statins

I have been on statins for over a year. On Rosuvastatin 10 mg to be specific. I am tired all the time. I push myself along from one task to another and do OK, but I never have much ambition or "get up and go".

Yesterday I was having a great day, then I noticed -- I had forgotten to take my medications for 2 days! Could there be a connection?

I tried the experiment of not taking the statin a month ago, but I was unsure if it made a difference.

I found the following article interesting. I have always been skeptical of "brain fog". I know many individuals where brain fog is a normal condition and has very likely been part of their makeup since birth. That aside, diagnosing ones own mental state is famously difficult. You are using a broken machine to diagnose itself. Consider hypothermia and stories of individuals dying of dehydration in the desert. In both cases, people end up doing crazy stuff and the condition itself makes it hard to recognize what is happening.

One fact from the above article is that 50 percent of people taking statins discontinue then within a year. This leads me to believe that side effects are more common and more annoying that what is described by the medical community.

I will conduct some more experiments of my own. Ultimately it is a cost -- benefit analysis to balance the benefit of lowered cholesterol numbers versus quality of life issues.

Note that there is no expectation of any dramatic or drastic result from discontinuing a statin drug. The effects of elevated cholesterol are cumulative over a lifetime. I have entirely ignored cholesterol issues for over 70 years of life and only now am I seeing issues. For me, statin drugs are part of a two pronged attack on cholesterol, the other prong being a serious change in diet, particularly reducing my saturated fat intake. I can certainly continue (and perhaps even get more radical) with this while discontinuing statin drugs.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's home page / tom@mmto.org