The Truth About Statins
One of the most common medications might be even better than we previously thought.
Statins are a fascinating class of medications. Discovered in the 70s, statins were the result of a truly classic example of scientific innovation—one group of scientists identified that cholesterol could form plaques in arteries, another proved that this led to heart disease, and then finally a team found a molecule that could prevent this from occurring. Decades later, statins are probably tied with GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic for the most lifesaving discovery of the last 50 years.
Despite this, there have been fears about the side-effects of these drugs. RFK Jr. and many of his collaborators have long said that statins are terrible drugs that cause awful issues. Dr. Aseem Malhotra, for example, has stated that statins should be used sparingly because of side-effects such as brain fog and erectile dysfunction.
The good news is that this appears to be untrue—a new paper has aggregated together all of the evidence on statin therapy from the last few decades, and shown that most purported side-effects of statins are not caused by the drugs themselves.
Let’s look at the data.
