People have often claimed that their medications have made them do something awful. Some say as soon as they started taking a certain drug, something changed. But do drugs change who we are? Researcher Dr. Beatrice Golomb says it occurs when patients start taking statins. (1, 2)
Statins And Who We Are
We are familiar with how psychedelic drugs can affect our minds, but ordinary medications like statins can also have an effect on who we are and our health. Statins are a group of medications that lower cholesterol. The research is fairly limited and some studies are observational-based and therefore limited. But studies do indicate that statins are associated with aggression, irritability, violent ideation, homicidal and suicidal ideation, and mood and personality change. The reports have shown that these changes occur as soon as 1 day after starting on certain statins. The changes in all of the patients occurred after drug initiation, meaning they weren’t there before being on the medication. Much of the time the effects are subtle, but they can also be serious, sometimes resulting in death by suicide or aggressive behavior. (2)
Golomb told BBC that this is common, but many patents don’t recognize the changes. Many of them do not connect it to their medication, and sometimes its too late. (1, 2) Golomb says she suspected a connection between statins and personality changes almost twenty years ago after discovering that people with lower cholesterol levels are more likely to be violent. (3) Her colleagues and professional experts brushed her off. But Golomb was determined to investigate.
“There was shockingly more evidence than I had imagined,” she told BBC. (1)
Current Research Says Statins Change Who We Are
Golomb found that putting primates on a low-cholesterol diet makes them aggressive. (4) The effect seemed to show that lowering their cholesterol also lowered serotonin levels. This resulted in a change in behavior, mood, and social behavior causing more violence and aggression. (4) Serotonin is an important neurochemical associated with mood regulation and social behavior. Changes in levels in humans can cause impulsivity, suicide, and aggression, as evidenced by studies from the 1990s. (5)
Since her investigations, Golomb led her own randomized controlled study in 2015. She researched the effects in 1,000 people and indeed did find those same results. Statins did produce more aggression, but in postmenopausal women and not men. (6) But she remains convinced that the effects exist for both men and women. (1)
Golomb conducted another study in Sweden where she compared the local criminal records with the database of cholesterol levels of 250,000 people. “There are lines of evidence converging,” she told BBC. “Even adjusting for confounding factors, it was still the case that people with lower cholesterol at baseline were significantly more likely to be arrested for violent crimes. ” (1)
But what she’s most concerned about is that others do seem to be interested in investigating the relationship. For a long time, research on the side-effects of statins was all about the muscles and the liver. Standard blood tests can easily find problems in those organs. (1)
“There’s much more of an emphasis on things that doctors can easily measure,” Golomb says. (1)
