A viewer asks: “Statin drugs are a real potential problem because in attacking cholesterol, you are impairing the body’s ability to utilize a necessary component. Most people don’t know it, but the human brain has a huge content of cholesterol. We’re seeing an EXPLOSION of Alzheimer’s and dementia. Could statin drugs be part of the problem?”

There may well be an appreciation down the line of an association with the use of statin drugs and the early onset dementia. This is because of the potential for causing cognitive impairment through too aggressive a restriction of dietary substances coupled with cholesterol-lowering agents to impair neurologic function in the brain for the reasons you mention, that cholesterol is essential for brain makeup and functioning, and to take medication designed to remove cholesterol from the system, that does so within tissues, is deleterious and not a helpful therapeutic strategy. These agents have other side effects as well, and because cholesterol is not a threat except in a true hypercholesterolemia situation, which is a relatively rare medical condition, these agents really have no place in widespread use and the practice should be abandoned.