Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/22/statins-might-make-you-a-big-j.html
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I’m statin away from that stuff.
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Always explain to folks that we need to be on as few drugs as we can get away with. Just more support for that position!
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Well, there’s boomers explained in a nutshell: lead, statins and TV.
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Must be in the water here. Every f’ing day on the DC beltway.
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Might as well be, pretty much everyone over 40 in the US is on them, and increasingly people under.
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Sooo…is Trump on Statins? Not that he’d be nice without them…
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Yes. 40 mg of rosuvastatin (aka Crestor) daily.
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The article reminded me of a conversation with a friend a few years ago. She was in her last year of med school and we were talking about the problems in over prescribing and the unknown long-term effects. I chose statins as an example. She responded that although that is generally true, statins are the gold standard of a life saving drug without negative side-effects that we don’t need to worry about in prescribing. I’d suggest that no drug should be taken without really good reason (and with recognition of likely side effects).
For instance a collaborator (whose work on associations between serotonin and aggression was cited by the bbc article) has also pointed out to me in the past that antihistamines have long-term neurological effects (through acetylcholine) that are also similarly understudied
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I was put on a statin years ago and after a few weeks my friends told me that my personality had changed and I was becoming very difficult to be around. I was lucky enough to have a doctor that changed to a different statin and I got back to merely being my usual grumpy self 
Seriously, people have different reactions to different statins. I switched from Crestor to Zocor to avoid the personality change.
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After reading this article, one thing is becoming pretty clear. No one knows what the synergistic effects of these powerful chemicals are. There are just too many to have to trial and the effects can be a long time coming. As @docosc said -
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this shit scares me
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Probably: https://www.foxnews.com/story/study-finds-traces-of-drugs-in-drinking-water-in-24-major-u-s-regions
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I’m not clicking on a FoxNews link, talk about contaminated! 
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fwiw I’ve been on atorvastatin (generic Lipitor) for a while and my temperament hasn’t changed a bit.
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The link between Tylenol (300 pills per person per year in USA) and decreased empathy seems a more devastating impact to society IMO.
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Trump + Statin = Stalin
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I had a specialist (whom I really liked, but he retired) look at my list and say “You’re really on too many drugs.” After a moment, he said, “But you can’t stop any of these.”
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They ought to confine people taking these drugs to an island. In New York. Call it, I don’t know, Statin Island.
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Yeah, funny that. As commenters in another recent Boing Boing discussion thread pointed out, environmental exposure to teflon byproducts results in elevated cholesterol levels. Which very well might be a contributing factor to the epidemic of elevated cholesterol in American adults. And at least in my experience, any time your cholesterol is more than slightly elevated your doctor is going to start pushing statins on you like a back-alley drug dealer in a 70’s blaxploitation film. “Listen man, you need this shit. It’s the best.”
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