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WEDNESDAY, Aug. 20, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Long-term use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs causes no psychological harm, says new research.
The findings contradict results from earlier research that linked cholesterol reduction to increased risk of depression or suicide. The new study, published in the Aug. 20 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, found that people who took statin drugs for long periods actually reported better moods.
"Statins seem to be associated with a reduced risk of anxiety, depression and hostility. We saw somewhere between 30 to 40 percent reduction of risk," researcher Yinong Young-Xu, of the Lown Cardiovascular Research Foundation and Harvard School of Public Health, says in a news release.
For the study, 140 people taking statins long-term and 231 people taking no cholesterol-lowering drugs completed annual psychological questionnaires. All study participants had chronic stable coronary artery disease.
Results showed that statin use was associated with a lower risk of abnormal depression, anxiety and hostility, and the effects seem to be independent of the drugs' cholesterol-lowering effects, the researchers indicated.
This doesn't prove that statins directly improve a person's psychological health, according to Young-Xu, but the findings indicate that the average person does not need to worry about psychological side effects when taking statins for long periods.
"It's a real population, not a specialized study," Young-Xu says. "These patients didn't have to do anything special. They were being treated regularly; we were not controlling their dosage or type of statin. We studied whatever type of statin they were on. And this study was very long; we followed them for 7 years, with psychometric measurements every year."
Increasingly, statins are being used to treat not only people with heart disease but also people who appear healthy but have risk factors for heart disease.
"Based on projections from recent guidelines, there could be as many as 36 million Americans taking statins in the future," Young-Xu says. "There will be a lot of just regular folks takings statins to lower their cholesterol."
More information
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