First time poster here and hoping for answers after weeks of research:

My wife's cholesterol was 260 and she was put on simistatin (sp?). Inside of a few weeks I started noticing memory issues. Then in 9 months she had three events of global amnesia as in completely forgetting things like going to a show where a violin player was playing and dancing on our table as well as taking the car in for service with a girl friend and a number of issues with the car and phone calls to me. The memory of those events still do not exist. The service was a new battery and she had left the lights on a few months later and said I needed to take care of the cars as we needed a new battery. I pulled out the service receipt and she screamed, "Oh my God it's happening to me". She is 53 and her father, his two brothers, and their father all died with dementia starting by age 75 and frontal lobes lit-up with what I was told was TIA and vascular dementia. My wife's MRI has two small idiopathic finding in the frontal lobes.

She went off the statins and all is 90% better, but there are still some stark issues she forgets. I can tell her a detailed story and two weeks later start it again and I know she doesn't recall it. Here cholesterol is now up to 283 and the doctor said she really needs to go back on a statin. Mind you, my wife is 5'11" and about 180 pounds with average+ bone structure. If she lost 20 pounds she'd look sickly. Weight is not the issue and she exercises regularly and watches her diet.

The doctor's office called and he wants her back on. She asked the nurse her thoughts and she said off the record, don't do it. The nurse's husband is 50, went on them and had severe memory issues, went off them and they went away and as did the memory issues. He went back on when his cholesterol went back up and the memory issues kicked in again. He went off them but now a year later, he still has the severe memory issues.

My wife was speaking of this in the grocery store and a woman came over and said she couldn't help but over-hear the conversation. She was in hospital garb and showed her ID as an RN. She said she would rather put a gun in her mouth than to take any of these and predicts at one point, they will ban them for the side effects. I saw a book by an flight deck astronaut turned MD entitled, "How Lipitor Stole My Mind".

Have any other people heard of these memory issues?

Can anyone recommend what to do besides diet and exercise to lower cholesterol? The doc might well be right that with her family history, and looking like her father, she will start having strokes in the coming years as her brother did at age 58. But she is not going back on a statin.

Thanks in advance,