If so, statins, a group of lipid-lowering drugs that also protect blood vessels, might help stave off Alzheimer's, reasoned neurologist David Drachman of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and pharmaceutical epidemiologist Hershel Jick of Boston University's School of Medicine. Searching through health records from the United Kingdom, the researchers studied 60,000 people older than 50. They looked at the incidence of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias as well as patients' prescription histories for lipid-lowering drugs. The risk was not decreased in people who had normal cholesterol levels or who used drugs other than statins to reduce lipids. The study confirms a report in the October Archives of Neurology from a team led by cellular biologist Benjamin Wolozin of the Loyola University Chicago Medical Center.
Some neuroscientists are skeptical.
Drachman's study, for instance, included only 284 new cases of Alzheimer's, and of those, just 13 patients had used statins. A better answer may come from a clinical trial to test one statin, Lipitor, in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, which has just begun at the Sun Health Research Institute in Sun City, Arizona.