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1 lurker |
38 watchers
Jan 2020
7:41am, 14 Jan 2020
21,996 posts
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Lizzie W
^ mind/body - medication for physical symptoms can alter the mind
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Jan 2020
9:02am, 14 Jan 2020
47,103 posts
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GlennR
As a wise GP once said to me, any medication that works has side effects. Parts of that article are dangerously close to anti-vac nonsense.
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Jan 2020
9:08am, 14 Jan 2020
47,106 posts
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GlennR
FWIW, I’ve been taking statins for years and have never noticed any unwanted consequences. Although I was a foul-tempered git before I started.
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Jan 2020
9:28am, 14 Jan 2020
11,798 posts
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Cerrertonia
"Behavior" by Robert Sapolsky is an excellent book that spends quite a bit of time looking at how things like cholesterol affect the brain and in particular how things like empathy work within the brain. It's ~700 pretty dense pages covering a pretty wide area from evolution, sociobiology, neurobiology, biochemistry, endocrinology, but really well written. I don't think there's anything too surprising in that BBC article. As far as I know, statins do carry health warnings in the US for possible mental health, suicide & violent behavior risks. |
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Jan 2020
10:19am, 14 Jan 2020
47,107 posts
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GlennR
My guess - and it is very much a guess - is that the release of fats into the bloodstream might conceivably have an impact on the functioning of the brain. However, as the NHS site points out, even with the common side effects it is difficult to know whether or not they are caused by the drug, given the incidence in the general population: nhs.uk |
Jan 2020
10:35am, 14 Jan 2020
18,685 posts
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Dvorak
Hypothesis: a lot of elderly people who are diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer's/ dementia/etc are actually experiencing side-effects of statins. And earwax nursingtimes.net scientificamerican.com (Either or both of which could be the case for my father, or it could just be that he is 91.) |
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Jan 2020
10:39am, 14 Jan 2020
47,111 posts
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GlennR
Dvorak, one thing I've learned from my mother's recent episodes is that dementia symptoms can be side effects of otherwise minor infections. It might be helpful if this fact were more widely known.
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Jan 2020
10:47am, 14 Jan 2020
11,800 posts
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Cerrertonia
There's all-cause mortality data for statins (for big numbers of people worldwide, being such a widely taken class of drug) that show that overall it reduces cardiovascular related deaths pretty significantly, but with a corresponding small (but statistically significant) increase in suicides, deaths in car accidents, deaths by violence. Of course, it gets pretty difficult to unentangle all the confounding factors there - you're obviously more likely to drive or get into a fight if you haven't just had a heart attack, for example. About a quarter of the body's cholesterol is in the brain, it's the starting point for making steroid hormones and myelin sheaths around the axons of nerve cells. The brain makes and recycles its own cholesterol though and so changing blood levels of cholesterol shouldn't affect the brain. Really wouldn't be too surprising if some tiny percentage of people were affected in the ways described though. |
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Jan 2020
2:11pm, 14 Jan 2020
18,692 posts
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Dvorak
Western Isles weather, yesterday's peak gusts m.facebook.com 101mph reported on South Uist. |
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Jan 2020
2:26pm, 14 Jan 2020
11,823 posts
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Cerrertonia
[After running the Hebridean Way a few months back, I have various western isles tourist type things on facebook. One of them was showing video yesterday of the wind blowing waves seemingly bigger than houses and going right over the top of the isthmus that separates the Aird pensinsula from Stornoway.]
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