Can Statins Make You Crazy?

Physician Beatrice Golomb at the University of California-San DiegoPatient thinks Statins can make some people irritable and even violent:

Patient 1 wanted to kill someone. Normally even-tempered, the 63-year-old man found himself awaking with an uncontrolled anger and the desire to smash things. His violent impulses started after he began taking the cholesterol-lowering statin Lipitor and they vanished within two days of quitting the drug. Patient 2 developed a short fuse after he started on Zocar, another popular statin. The 59-year-old felt an impulse to kill his wife, and once tried, unsuccessfully, to do so. His violent tendencies subsided within a few weeks of stopping Zocar. Patient 3, a 46-year-old female, became unusually irritable while taking Lipitor, repeatedly blowing up at her husband for no reason. Like the others, her uncharacteristic behavior disappeared after she quit taking statins.

This is all just anecdote, vigorously denied by the important players. But as Christie Aschwanden points out, it is very difficult to detect rare side effects of drugs, and when you give a drug to millions of people the really rare stuff will start to show up in your sample. And drugs do often turn out to have side effects not detected in initial trials:

A 2002 JAMA study showed that only half of all serious drug side effects are detected within seven years of the drug’s approval.

I find this interesting because of the possible connection between body chemistry and character. What if the bodies best at dealing with our fatty diets are the ones wired for tension, people who burn up a lot of calories just worrying, or being angry at the world? What if being a relaxed, gentle sort of person makes you more liable to get fat or to get heart disease from eating too much? There is some evidence that people with low cholesterol are more likely to be aggressive:

Monkeys put on cholesterol-reducing diets become more aggressive, and numerous studies have linked low or lowered cholesterol to violent behavior in people, too. For instance, one study compared the cholesterol measurements of nearly 80,000 Swedes who’d enrolled in a health-screening project against police records and found that violent criminals had significantly lower cholesterol levels than noncriminals.

Messing with our bodies may turn out to change who we are, and I think we should be careful about that.