My mom always had a pretty sharp memory and, working as a bookkeeper with numbers most of her life, she stayed sharp and wasn't one to easily forget things. She had her first stroke at age 75 from very high blood pressure that her cardiologist told her was okay, as long as she didn't have chest pain (he became her cardiologist after her open heart surgery 4 years earlier). After this life-changing health event, she was prescribed multiple prescription drugs which are supposed to "prevent" another stroke. About six months later, she had an episode of what I learned later was called Transient Global Amnesia.
We were at a family gathering and my younger sister was showing everyone a small stuffed cat that she had bought for an opera-singing friend of hers. It was animated and sang "O Sole Meow," which was a funny twist on the 19th century Italian song, "O Sole Mio." Since my mom's parents were from Italy, she loved this rendition and laughed at this singing cat, along with the rest of us. But two days later, when my sister mentioned going out of town to visit her friend and give her the singing cat, my mom was baffled as to what singing cat she was talking about. My sister described it to her, but she still had no recollection of what she saw and heard just two days earlier! It was a transient amnesia episode.
My younger sister immediately talked about wanting to take our mom for Alzheimer's testing. But, because I remembered that my mom had many problems in the past from prescription drug side effects, so I was concerned with all these new drugs that she began taking. I immediately went online to research each one she was taking. That's where I found the cause of her amnesia episode: a cholesterol-lowering statin drug. These drugs affect memory function in many people, but doctors and pharmaceutical companies are hesitant to share that "secret" with the public.
Our liver makes cholesterol because so many areas of our body depend upon it (especially our brain's memory synapses and our muscles), so I learned that this idea of taking a drug to lower cholesterol wasn't as great as the doctors and pharmaceutical companies have everyone believing. In my research, I found a website that was created by a former NASA astronaut and MD named Duane Graveline. He described the similar amnesia problem that he experienced and even wrote a book on the subject, titled, "Lipitor: Thief of Memory."
My mom was pretty organized and always saved her lab test printouts in a health folder for each year, so I looked through them to see what her latest cholesterol reading was, as well as what it had been over the past few years. I found that her total cholesterol was typically around 180 to sometimes, just over 200. So those numbers don't warrant going on a medication to push that lower, but after a stroke, doctors mistakenly believe that "lower is better" with respect to cholesterol. Her latest total cholesterol reading was 135, which I learned later was too low for the brain to function properly in most people. But in order to "prevent another stroke," doctors routinely put people on these harmful drugs, regardless of what the total cholesterol reading is. So I mentioned to my mom that she should ask her primary care doctor at her next visit if she can discontinue this one, which she did and he agreed to with no hesitation.
I learned recently that, a study showed that between 10% and 25% of people on statin drugs get new muscle pain after they start taking them. And, for the majority of people who are taking a statin drug and develop a memory problem, once they discontinue the drug, their memory function returns to normal. But for a small percentage of those people, the memory problem is permanent. Unfortunately for my mom, she was in the permanent memory damage group. I later learned from Jan McBarron, MD, ND on her Duke and the Doctor national radio show that she believes that it's no coincidence that there is a dramatic rise in people being diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease that parallels a rise in people being put on statin drugs. The brain needs cholesterol!
After discontinuing the statin drug, my mom didn't seem to have another amnesia episode, but her short-term memory did decline continuously until it was apparent that she had dementia. For what I learned about that, please read my post on Dealing with Memory Problems in the Elderly.
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