I'm 55 and I had some cognitive issues for a couple of years. This is what I've found:
Get off of cholesterol meds! Death is better than being stupid. Satins are the worst. I lost one job after a year when I was on 10mg of Lipitor. It got to the point that I was beginning to wonder if I would have to give up driving because I was having trouble concentrating well enough to drive safely (i.e. stay in my own lane on the freeway). You can imagine what meetings at work were like for me. I was just about to go see my doctor for what I was sure would be a brain tumor, when I asked myself: what's changed? I skipped my meds for a day and felt better. After a couple of weeks, I took another pill and felt much worse, so I stopped for good. It took about 2 to 3 years for me to recover.
The "mental fog" is not a generally recognized side effect of statins, though it is one of the most common statin side effects reported to the UCSD Statin Effects Studyhttps://www.statineffects.com/info/. So, your doctor may have heard of it but the reports are anecdotal, not published. The UCSD study did one test where they tried to detect mental decline with statins but that study did not detect any. There is, however, at least one study that associated low cholesterol with cognitive issues.
The statins work by suppressing the mevalonate pathway in your liver. Mevalonate is a precursor to cholesterol and a whole bunch of other important stuff. One of the key things in "other stuff" is CoQ10. I now take 100mg of CoQ10 every 3 days or so. I feel as mentally sharp as I was in my 30s.
After I stopped the Lipitor, my doctor put my on Vytorin. Vytorin works differently than a statin. Vytorin inhibits cholesterol absorption in your intestines. I found the effect of Vytorin to be much milder than Lipitor but still too much to live with without a really clear payoff to taking it. Going from 2 chances in 10 of a heart attack to 1 chance in 10 isn't worth it to me. YMMV. During that time I was taking Vytorin, I didn't do well at another job, not badly enough to get fired, just bad enough that I didn't feel like I was making a contribution. If you miss the "make a good impression" window when you start a new job, it's really hard to recover.
At the risk of sounding totally arrogant, I'll say that the one good thing about that experience is that I understand people of average and below average intelligence better.:-) The world is a different place for them and they need to cope differently.
Other medications can cause mental problems too but I don't have any experience with them.
B vitamin supplements can help a lot too, especially if you drink or are under a lot of stress. I take two B-50s every day.
Exercise and sleep It helps keep your weight down and your energy level up. I find that exercise helps me sleep better which helps me think more clearly. Exercise is a challenge because I just don't recover as fast as I used to. If I worked out now as intensely as I did 15 years ago, I'd be a basket case for 6 months! My muscles recover from workouts well, the problem is tendons, ligaments, and joints. They take forever to heal. Check out Clarence Bass http://cbass.com/ to get an idea of what is possible. He only works out twice a week! A lot of 20-somethings would love to look as good as he does. There's a lot of good info on his site too.
I do Yoga, weightlifting, backpack (Scoutmaster for a local troop - talk about an interesting set of problems!), and some high-intensity cardio; I've had too many overuse injuries with long-slow-cardio. I've not been able to lift he
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I'm 55 and I had some cognitive issues for a couple of years. This is what I've found:
:-) The world is a different place for them and they need to cope differently.
Get off of cholesterol meds! Death is better than being stupid. Satins are the worst. I lost one job after a year when I was on 10mg of Lipitor. It got to the point that I was beginning to wonder if I would have to give up driving because I was having trouble concentrating well enough to drive safely (i.e. stay in my own lane on the freeway). You can imagine what meetings at work were like for me. I was just about to go see my doctor for what I was sure would be a brain tumor, when I asked myself: what's changed? I skipped my meds for a day and felt better. After a couple of weeks, I took another pill and felt much worse, so I stopped for good. It took about 2 to 3 years for me to recover.
The "mental fog" is not a generally recognized side effect of statins, though it is one of the most common statin side effects reported to the UCSD Statin Effects Study https://www.statineffects.com/info/. So, your doctor may have heard of it but the reports are anecdotal, not published. The UCSD study did one test where they tried to detect mental decline with statins but that study did not detect any. There is, however, at least one study that associated low cholesterol with cognitive issues.
The statins work by suppressing the mevalonate pathway in your liver. Mevalonate is a precursor to cholesterol and a whole bunch of other important stuff. One of the key things in "other stuff" is CoQ10. I now take 100mg of CoQ10 every 3 days or so. I feel as mentally sharp as I was in my 30s.
After I stopped the Lipitor, my doctor put my on Vytorin. Vytorin works differently than a statin. Vytorin inhibits cholesterol absorption in your intestines. I found the effect of Vytorin to be much milder than Lipitor but still too much to live with without a really clear payoff to taking it. Going from 2 chances in 10 of a heart attack to 1 chance in 10 isn't worth it to me. YMMV. During that time I was taking Vytorin, I didn't do well at another job, not badly enough to get fired, just bad enough that I didn't feel like I was making a contribution. If you miss the "make a good impression" window when you start a new job, it's really hard to recover.
After reading some of the posts in the Yahoo Stopped_Our_Statins group http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Stopped_Our_Statins, I feel lucky to have recovered at all.
At the risk of sounding totally arrogant, I'll say that the one good thing about that experience is that I understand people of average and below average intelligence better.
Other medications can cause mental problems too but I don't have any experience with them.
B vitamin supplements can help a lot too, especially if you drink or are under a lot of stress. I take two B-50s every day.
Exercise and sleep It helps keep your weight down and your energy level up. I find that exercise helps me sleep better which helps me think more clearly. Exercise is a challenge because I just don't recover as fast as I used to. If I worked out now as intensely as I did 15 years ago, I'd be a basket case for 6 months! My muscles recover from workouts well, the problem is tendons, ligaments, and joints. They take forever to heal. Check out Clarence Bass http://cbass.com/ to get an idea of what is possible. He only works out twice a week! A lot of 20-somethings would love to look as good as he does. There's a lot of good info on his site too.
I do Yoga, weightlifting, backpack (Scoutmaster for a local troop - talk about an interesting set of problems!), and some high-intensity cardio; I've had too many overuse injuries with long-slow-cardio. I've not been able to lift he