Patriarch of Georgia singlehandedly raises birth rate by 20%

BBC:

Two years after having one of the lowest birth rates in the world, Georgia is enjoying something of a baby boom, following an intervention from the country's most senior cleric.

At the end of 2007, in a move to reverse the Caucasian country's dwindling birth figures, the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilia II, came up with an incentive. He promised to personally baptise any baby born to parents of more than two children.

There was only one catch: the baby had to be born after the initiative was launched.

The results are, in the words of the Georgian Orthodox Church, "a miracle".

The country's birth rate increased by nearly 20% during 2008 - a rate four times faster than the previous year.

Many parents say they took the decision to have another child on the basis of the Patriarch's incentive. [...]

Many other parents agree. It is perhaps not surprising in a country where more than 80% of people follow the Orthodox faith.

Yes, the country's population is 80% Orthodox, but there's much more to it than that. For starters, it's the Georgian Orthodox Church, so the religion and the patriarch both have nationalistic roles. The Patriarch's appeal to have more babies spoke both to the people's religious faith and their patriotism. Check out the flag, which tells you all you need to know about the Georgian nexus of religion and nation:



If a nation's people are convinced that having children is more than a private, self-interested choice, if they feel that they are contributing their children to the nation, they'll have more of them.

Have archaeologists found the Garden of Eden?

Could be. A recent article in the Daily Mail, Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden?, lays out the evidence, the find that has been called the most important archaeological find ever, "'the most important' site in the world". It's Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, and has been dated to 10,000 B.C., making it the oldest known site of it's kind, predating the pyramids by over 7,000 years, predating the invention of writing by 6,000 years, and the most astounding fact of all, it was built by hunter-gatherers. The archaeologists think that not only could this be the source of the myth of the Garden of Eden, but also marks almost exactly the spot in which agriculture was invented.

The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.

That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.

Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.

How did cavemen build something so ambitious? Schmidt speculates that bands of hunters would have gathered sporadically at the site, through the decades of construction, living in animal-skin tents, slaughtering local game for food.

The many flint arrowheads found around Gobekli support this thesis; they also support the dating of the site.

This revelation, that Stone Age hunter-gatherers could have built something like Gobekli, is worldchanging, for it shows that the old hunter-gatherer life, in this region of Turkey, was far more advanced than we ever conceived - almost unbelievably sophisticated.

Here' what the linked article says about the Eden connection:

In the Book of Genesis, it is indicated that Eden is west of Assyria. Sure enough, this is where Gobekli is sited.

Likewise, biblical Eden is by four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates. And Gobekli lies between both of these.

In ancient Assyrian texts, there is mention of a 'Beth Eden' - a house of Eden. This minor kingdom was 50 miles from Gobekli Tepe.

Another book in the Old Testament talks of 'the children of Eden which were in Thelasar', a town in northern Syria, near Gobekli.

The very word 'Eden' comes from the Sumerian for 'plain'; Gobekli lies on the plains of Harran.

Thus, when you put it all together, the evidence is persuasive. Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a 'temple in Eden', built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors - people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise.

Smithsonian on Gobleki Tepe.

Why people steal rare books

Tim Richardson, writing in the Financial Times (you may need to register to read the article) discusses "what drives people to steal precious books".

Every so often a high-profile example of book theft makes the news. The crime in question does not concern hard-up students helping themselves to textbooks in Foyles. Rather it details cases of premeditated, often audacious, theft of beautiful and rare books.

It happened in January, when Farhad Hakimzadeh, an Iranian businessman and book collector, was given a two-year sentence for cutting and stealing pages from antiquarian books in the British and Bodleian libraries over seven years. Hakimzadeh, 60, said he took the pages, from texts that date back to the 16th century and deal with European and Middle Eastern relations, only to augment his own collection. It was proved, however, that he was using stolen single pages to increase the value of books he already owned, which he could then sell. One such page contained a 500-year-old map painted by Hans Holbein, an artist in the court of Henry VIII, worth £32,000.

It turns out that Hakimzadeh was caught once before doing the same thing back in the 90s and got off nearly scot-free. (Irrelevant aside: is "scot free" an ethnic slur? Probably not.)In the other cases that Richardson discusses, the perps all got off with what were, to my mind, ridiculously light sentences. To someone like Hakimzadeh, who allegedly spent his wedding night cleaning his books, the possibility of a two-year sentence or, better yet, a slap on the wrist or settling out of court must seem like a risk well worth taking.

Stronger sentences are needed, like 25 years to life. Personally, as a non-criminal who has a difficult time fathoming the criminal mind, execution wouldn't bother me a bit, at least for a repeat offense.

Also worth noting is that Hakimzadeh is obviously not ethnically British and is likely an immigrant. Shocking.

Why We're Unhappy: The Truth of the Noble Savage?

In his book, Psychiatry and the Human Condition, Bruce Charlton contends that mental illness in some form or other, at some times, and to some degree, is a virtually inescapable condition of modern life.

Imagine a world in which many of the people suffer from psychiatric symptoms for most of the time and very few live out their lifespan without suffering periods of significant psychiatric illness. I am describing the world we live in.

In addition to overt mental illness, add those who suffer from sleep deprivation or insomnia, or are miserable due to chronic pain or disease, or are intoxicated or suffering its aftermath:

When considered in this way, it is clear that few people are free of psychiatric symptoms for sustained periods of time. And if psychiatric symptoms are a matter of everyday life, then so - potentially - is their treatment. Such is the scale that professional management is inconceivable, as well as undesirable. Logistically, this means an expansion in psychiatric self-help - which entails expertise in self-diagnosis, self-treatment and the self-evaluation evaluation of this process.

The human condition, as we experience it in contemporary life, is one where psychiatric symptoms are endemic, being constantly present in the population - and present at a remarkably high prevalence.

Now, why should this be? The first part of Charlton's answer is that humans did not evolve to be happy; we evolved to survive and reproduce, with happiness being merely an incentive to do those things. Happiness is merely the condition in which the characteristic state of mind is one of having one's needs and goals satisfied. The second part of the answer is that we live in a society radically different from the one in which we evolved and for which we seem to be best suited, namely the society of hunter-gatherers.

Charlton is no Utopian; nevertheless, he makes a good case that, on average, human beings living in their "natural", paleolithic state are happier than in modern industrial society. Also, consistent with his realism, he acknowledges that, of the three main types of societies - hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and industrial - agricultural society makes for the most miserable people, who when given the chance flock to industrial society, preferring, e.g., work in a coal mine to work as an agricultural laborer.

I'm sure we all thought that Rousseau and his noble savage had been thoroughly debunked. While paleolithic society was hardly a paradise, it did have several aspects conducive to human mental health. They were healthy in body, possessed abundant leisure, and were egalitarian:

In summary, the ancestral hunter gatherers experienced a way of life that was - in world historical terms - leisured and egalitarian, and enjoyed health and life expectancy at a high level. Of the three kinds of society as described by Gellner: hunter-gatherer, agrarian, and mercantile, it is probable that hunter-gatherers had the best life, overall. Hunter gatherer societies are the happiest and peasant societies are the most miserable - while industrial-mercantile societies such as our own lie somewhere in between.

One very good piece of evidence for the adaptive nature of primitive societies lies in child-rearing:

The ‘naturalness’ of nomadic foraging is also shown by differences in the harshness of child rearing practices in different types of society. Child rearing involves varying elements of forcible training that are necessary to prepare children for their social role. Peasant societies typically employ extremely repressive forms of socialization, extreme discipline, restriction, and the use of child labour. Industrial mercantile societies (such as our own) are much less tough on children - but still require many unnatural behaviors (eg. sitting in classrooms or examination halls for long periods of time without speaking or moving). But nomadic foragers are able and willing to give their children even more freedom than the most liberal ‘modern parent’ - and such a relaxed upbringing of unstructured interaction with peers apparently prepares the child properly for the adult life to come.

This post only touches on one small part of Charlton's rich, fruitful book, on which I may write more later. He's made the entire book available online, and it's well worth your time.

Victory in 9000 BC

Newly in my possession: a thick, handsomely-produced copy of Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC - AD 1000 by Barry Cunliffe, emeritus professor of European archaeology at Oxford. It's loaded with illustrations and maps, and looks like just the thing for the European-American man-on-the-go who wants to discover his roots. Benjamin Schwarz reviewed it in The Atlantic ("Geography Is Destiny"), and wrote:

Lavishly illustrated and replete with a sumptuous array of creatively conceived color maps, Cunliffe’s book is further proof that its publisher produces the most beautiful and intelligently designed works of scholarship in the humanities. I can’t think of a better gift this year for the historically minded reader.

Notice the subtitle: no BCE or CE nonsense but BC and AD. Yale University Press published the book, if you can believe it. Have the neo-Marxist forces of PC been rolled back? What happened? Don't they know what AD stands for? Or BC either?

One small victory for mankind.

Schizophrenia, grain consumption, and accelerated evolution

A "highly accessed" paper in the open-access journal Nutrition and Metabolism discusses the case history of a woman with lifelong schizophrenia which went into remission 8 days after starting a low-carbohydrate, gluten-free diet.

In the paper the authors refer to another, Is schizophrenia rare if grain is rare?. The abstract:

If, as hypothesized, neuroactive peptides from grain glutens are the major agents evoking schizophrenia in those with the genotype(s), it should be rare if grain is rare. To test this, we analyzed the results of our clinical examinations (e.g., kuru) and observations of anthropologists on peoples consuming little or no grain. Only two overtly insane chronic schizophrenics were found among over 65,000 examined or closely observed adults in remote regions of Papua New Guinea (PNG, 1950-1967) and Malaita , Solomon Islands (1980-1981), and on Yap , Micronesia (1947-1948). In preneuroleptic Europe over 130 would have been expected. When these peoples became partially westernized and consumed wheat, barley beer, and rice, the prevalence reached European levels. Our findings agree with previous epidemiologic and experimental results indicating that grain glutens are harmful to schizophrenics.

According to this (pdf), written by the same author as the above, schizophrenia is far more common in Ireland than in England and Wales. It may be no coincidence that celiac disease, a serious pathological response to dietary wheat, is very common in Ireland.

Celiac disease rates "follow interaction between genetic gradients, largely determined by the advance of agriculture, and historical patterns of cereal ingestion", i.e. those cultures that have the longest exposure to wheat have the lowest rates of celiac disease because the genetically susceptible have been winnowed from the population. So it appears that at least some cases of schizophrenia are also related to the consumption of wheat.

One more reason to think that the paleolithic diet is what we are designed to eat, and that agriculture has had many evolutionary effects. It also might be that cultures only recently exposed to agriculture will have a higher rate of schizophrenia than the oldest-exposed cultures, thus putting them at an evolutionary disadvantage, perhaps a small one in this case.

There's no getting away from the statin question - updated

A friend of mine who has read some of the things I've had to say about statins and cholesterol emailed me today. He is concerned about his 85-year-old mother,

otherwise in good health, who takes 20 mg/day of Crestor for high cholesterol. She has experienced some memory problems which are bothersome. She has less and less faith in doctors, partly because of me. I don't want her taking drugs she does not need. Not asking advice but rather thoughts, as I value your opinion.

Obviously I can't give medical advice, but I advised my friend that it might be a good idea to arm himself with the appropriate information and talk to his mother's doctor.

My friend is in a tough spot. He has reason to think that at least a possibility exists that prescription meds could be doing his mother harm. Yet, his mother's doctor could insist that she needs to be on a statin - and he could even be right in this particular situation - and then what do you do? One would have to pretty confident in the truth of one's position to buck a doctor who says that one's mother could have a heart attack without a statin. And then what if her memory gets worse?

I do have a point, and that is that with lowering cholesterol having come to be considered practically the Holy Grail of cardiology, you the reader, or a loved one, perhaps an elderly parent, stand a good chance that you will go into a doctor's office for a routine visit and come away with a prescription for a statin. There are doctors out there who have, at least semi-seriously, discussed putting these drugs in the drinking water; that may be hyperbole, but it signifies that these doctors believe that just about everyone - and his mother - ought to be taking them.

So one way or another, chances are good that a lot of you will make or be part of a decision regarding statins. Please choose wisely.

Update: From Business Week: Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good? Research suggests that, except among high-risk heart patients, the benefits of statins such as Lipitor are overstated

[...] Yes, Wright saw, the drugs can be life-saving in patients who already have suffered heart attacks, somewhat reducing the chances of a recurrence that could lead to an early death. But Wright had a surprise when he looked at the data for the majority of patients, like Winn, who don't have heart disease. He found no benefit in people over the age of 65, no matter how much their cholesterol declines, and no benefit in women of any age. He did see a small reduction in the number of heart attacks for middle-aged men taking statins in clinical trials. But even for these men, there was no overall reduction in total deaths or illnesses requiring hospitalization—despite big reductions in "bad" cholesterol. "Most people are taking something with no chance of benefit and a risk of harm," says Wright. Based on the evidence, and the fact that Winn didn't actually have angina, Wright changed his mind about treating him with statins—and Winn, too, was persuaded. "Because there's no apparent benefit," he says, "I don't take them anymore." [...]

The difference credited to the drug? One fewer heart attack per 100 people. So to spare one person a heart attack, 100 people had to take Lipitor for more than three years. The other 99 got no measurable benefit. Or to put it in terms of a little-known but useful statistic, the number needed to treat (or NNT) for one person to benefit is 100.

Compare that with, say, today's standard antibiotic therapy to eradicate ulcer-causing H. pylori stomach bacteria. The NNT is 1.1. Give the drugs to 11 people, and 10 will be cured.

Plus, there are reasons to believe the overall benefit for many patients is even less than what the NNT score of 100 suggests. That NNT was determined in an industry-sponsored trial using carefully selected patients with multiple risk factors, which include high blood pressure or smoking. In contrast, the only large clinical trial funded by the government, rather than companies, found no statistically significant benefit at all. And because clinical trials themselves suffer from potential biases, results claiming small benefits are always uncertain, says Dr. Nortin M. Hadler, professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a longtime drug industry critic. "Anything over an NNT of 50 is worse than a lottery ticket; there may be no winners," he argues. Several recent scientific papers peg the NNT for statins at 250 and up for lower-risk patients, even if they take it for five years or more. "What if you put 250 people in a room and told them they would each pay $1,000 a year for a drug they would have to take every day, that many would get diarrhea and muscle pain, and that 249 would have no benefit? And that they could do just as well by exercising? How many would take that?" asks drug industry critic Dr. Jerome R. Hoffman, professor of clinical medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. [...]

What would work better? Perhaps urging people to switch to a Mediterranean diet or simply to eat more fish. In several studies, both lifestyle changes brought greater declines in heart attacks than statins, though the trials were too small to be completely persuasive. Being physically fit is also important. "The things that really work are lifestyle, exercise, diet, and weight reduction," says UCLA's Hoffman. "They still have a big NNT, but the cost is much less than drugs and they have benefits for quality of life."

Read the whole thing.

True believers, however, will never be convinced.

The Irish in Britain

Brian Akira has taken strong exception to Lawrence Auster's so-called "anti-Irish rant", which has recently been the subject of a number of comments on this blog. While I have no great or detailed knowledge of Irish attitudes and politics, other than in the case of Northern Ireland, some of Akira's comments struck me as pretty strange or outright wrong.

The majority of Irish Americans are from loyalist stock — so called “Scots Irish” (and are predominantly Protestant, too, if that matters).

Words and names matter. When one speaks of the "Irish" in America one is normally speaking of Irish Catholic stock. The Scots-Irish are a distinct, Protestant ethnic group most of whose members came to America in the 18th century. The Kennedys, e.g., are of Irish Catholic stock, and Irish Catholics are not known for being "Loyalists". Making such an elementary error is the equivalent of saying that there's no difference between Protestant and Catholic in Northern Ireland.

That’s absurd. [That the Irish vote in Britain keeps Labour in power.] Evidence? “Around six million British have an Irish grandparent” Some majority!

Whether the Irish vote does or does not "keep Labour in power", it does not require a majority of the population to do so. Tipping the balance will suffice.

More garbage. The first part is one of the most absurd things I’ve ever read, and millions of Irish “immigrants” have no animosity and there are at least a million Irish British citizens who are much more patriotic than the average English Scot or Welsh Brit.

Evidence?

Irish people can’t immigrate to Britain since Ireland is a British Isle. All Irish people are British. The majority of Irish people in the British Isles are British citizens. The majority of Irish people in Great Britain are English/British patriots and are British citizens. There have never been any stringent immigration controls between The Irish Free State/Irish Republic and the United Kingdom since the two economies and societies have shared roots and are quite symbiotic.

I believe that most Irish people would take exception to the notion that "all Irish people are British", especially since the majority live in an independent Ireland that is not part of Britain. In a book I read not long ago, Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation, the British Isles are oddly renamed "the Atlantic Isles", apparently because either the author or many of the Irish object to their island being referred to as one of the British Isles.

Most Irish people - even citizens of he Republic of Ireland have no deep animus against “Britain” (by which I guess you mean the UK). The number of those who do is tiny.

Really? That's not my impression, but in any case some evidence to back up this assertion would be nice. Akira says that many Irish still join the British army, but that certainly doesn't mean that affection for Britain is their main or only motive for enlisting. Maybe they need a job. I could go on, but most of the rest of Akira's post consists of him stating how offended he is at all of this.

No Poverty Among Scandinavians

A Scandinavian economist once proudly said to free-market advocate Milton Friedman, "In Scandinavia we have no poverty." And Milton Friedman replied, "That's interesting, because in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either."

From P. J. O'Rourke's Eat the Rich. (Thanks to Subotai.)

It's almost as if the late Milton Friedman believed some things more important for wealth and poverty than economic systems.

Statin Corruption

Jerome Kassirer, editor-in-chief emeritus of The New England Journal of Medicine, in The Washington Post (from 2004):

On July 13, the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP), part of the National Institutes of Health, unveiled tougher guidelines for cholesterol levels -- guidelines so stringent that millions of Americans at risk of heart disease would have to take costly statin drugs to meet the new lower limits. What the NCEP didn't unveil was that most panel members who helped write the recommendations had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that stood to gain enormously from increased use of statins.

Critics immediately complained about the hidden financial ties, and demanded disclosure. Within days, the highly respected sponsors of the cholesterol guidelines -- the NIH, the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) -- posted the disclosures on the NCEP's Web site. The extent of the connections was stunning: Of the nine members of the panel that wrote the guidelines, six had each received research grants, speaking honoraria or consulting fees from at least three and in some cases all five of the manufacturers of statins; only one had no financial links at all.

If all the members with conflicts had recused themselves, in fact, only two would have been left.

Special bonus: Sir William Osler ("the father of modern medicine") on drugs:

One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

How alcohol causes liver disease

Staying with the health and medicine theme... onward to some important information. You can't help the revolution if you've got cirrhosis.

Obviously one must first drink a lot of alcohol to develop alcoholic liver disease (ALD) - an ER doc (NB: he was a colleague, not my physician) once told me that his rule of thumb for the development of liver disease was a bottle of liquor a day for ten years. Somewhat surprisingly, researchers in the field are not at all clear on the nature of the mechanism, nor why some alcoholics but not others become ill, as only some 30% of alcoholics develop ALD. The following represents some current thinking as to how liver disease develops and why some get it while others do not.

Leaky gut in alcoholic cirrhosis: a possible mechanism for alcohol-induced liver damage. This representative paper (I found a few dozen that I won't bother you with) reports an investigation into the relation between alcohol consumption and so-called leaky gut:

OBJECTIVE: Only 30% of alcoholics develop cirrhosis, suggesting that the development of alcohol-induced liver injury requires one or more additional factors. Animal studies have shown that gut-derived endotoxin is one such factor. Because increased intestinal permeability has been shown to cause endotoxemia, we hypothesized that increased gastrointestinal permeability contributes to the pathogenesis of alcoholic liver disease. This study aimed to measure gastroduodenal and intestinal permeability in alcoholics with and without chronic liver disease and in nonalcoholic subjects with chronic liver disease. [...]

CONCLUSION: Because only the alcoholics with chronic liver disease had increased intestinal permeability, we conclude that a "leaky" gut may be a necessary cofactor for the development of chronic liver injury in heavy drinkers.

The basic idea is that alcohol damages the intestinal lining, making it permeable to bacterial endotoxins - which are of course always present in the gut - and which then enter the bloodstream and go places where they shouldn't be, like the liver. Then the liver has a fit. Also, as someone who likes a drink, I'm sorry to bear the news that alcohol in any amount causes increased intestinal permeability. Moderate drinking is unlikely to cause cirrhosis, but it seems entirely possible that it could be the source of other, less serious health problems. It would also seem to follow that both nutritional and genetic factors may be at work in ALD.

But the good news is that ALD might be entirely avoidable, and furthermore, moderate drinkers may have decent means of protecting themselves from alcohol's deleterious effects. The summary of a symposium on the relation between alcohol and the gut said this:

Increased intestinal permeability can lead to increased transfer of endotoxin from the intestine to the liver and general circulation where endotoxin may trigger inflammatory changes in the liver and other organs. Alcohol may also increase intestinal permeability to peptidoglycan, which can initiate inflammatory response in liver and other organs. [...] In addition, intestinal permeability may be preserved by administering epidermal growth factor, l-glutamine, oats supplementation, or zinc, thereby preventing the transfer of endotoxin to the general circulation. Thus reducing the number of intestinal Gram-negative bacteria and preserving intestinal permeability to endotoxin may attenuate alcoholic liver and other organ injuries.

You may notice that zinc and glutamine are two of the substances Dr. Maes uses in his treatment of leaky gut in chronic fatigue. The same principle is at work.

Finally, the abstract to an interesting paper says that medium-chain triglycerides, found in high concentrations in coconut oil and palm oil - the kind that they all used to say was so bad for you - prevent alcoholic liver disease in rats by preserving intestinal integrity.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Update 3/12/09: This provides some confirmation of the ER doc's rule of thumb for liver disease:

The development of cirrhosis depends upon the amount and regularity of alcohol intake. Chronic, high levels of alcohol consumption injure liver cells. Thirty percent of individuals who drink daily at least eight to sixteen ounces of hard liquor or the equivalent for fifteen or more years will develop cirrhosis.

In other words, you have to do some very serious drinking to develop ALD.

Cholesterol and Heart Disease

As a public service, I once again bring you Dr. Malcolm Kendrick and his brief and definitive demolition of the cholesterol hypothesis of heart disease. (Full post with a review of Dr. Kendrick's book here.)

Cholesterol, says a a growing number of doctors and scientists, does not cause heart disease.

For decades, enormous human and financial resources have been wasted on the cholesterol campaign, more promising research areas have been neglected, producers and manufacturers of animal food all over the world have suffered economically, and millions of healthy people have been frightened and badgered into eating a tedious and flavorless diet or into taking potentially dangerous drugs for the rest of their lives. As the scientific evidence in support of the cholesterol campaign is non-existent, we consider it important to stop it as soon as possible.

Indeed, it would be strange that a substance produced in the body and crucial for virtually every biological function also killed people. Dietary cholesterol also has been shown to have little or no effect on serum cholesterol levels. If cholesterol caused heart disease, our ancestors would have been dropping like flies from it, since there were no treatments until the early to mid 20th century; but they didn't, and their diets abounded in meat and fat.

If cholesterol does not cause heart disease, there must be zero value in lowering it. To the extent that statins lower the incidence of heart disease, it appears that they do so by reducing inflammation. The cholesterol-lowering function of statins seems to be the cause of the bad side effects, which include memory loss, muscle weakness and pain, cancer, and depression.

The two doctors who commented extensively on my post on statins and brain health argued that the benefits of statins outweigh the risks, and that they have been shown to save lives. (One of the doctors did anyway; the other merely resorted to verbal abuse and assertions that only properly-credentialed persons have the capacity to understand the issues.) What no one has refuted is the contention that statins have serious side effects. In fact, they hardly addressed that issue, preferring instead to question the ability and motivations of anyone skeptical of statins.

One statin alone, Lipitor, generates $12 billion a year in revenue for its manufacturer, Pfizer. If one is looking for ulterior motives regarding statins, that's the place to start.

Update: Here's a nice little chart showing the relation between cholesterol levels and mortality. Originally posted in Low Cholesterol Kills.

Don't take statins if you need a functioning brain

Research by an Iowa State University scientist suggests that cholesterol-reducing drugs known as statins may lessen brain function.

Yeon-Kyun Shin, a biophysics professor in the department of biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology, says the results of his study show that drugs that inhibit the liver from making cholesterol may also keep the brain from making cholesterol, which is vital to efficient brain function.

"If you deprive cholesterol from the brain, then you directly affect the machinery that triggers the release of neurotransmitters," said Shin. "Neurotransmitters affect the data-processing and memory functions. In other words -- how smart you are and how well you remember things."

Link.

Memo: statins are bad for brain health. Don't take them if you need a functioning brain.

See also my post on low cholesterol as a potential cause of psychopathy. For the full lowdown on the dangers statins pose to brain function, see SpaceDoc, written by a former astronaut and M.D. whose serious brain health problems were caused by statins.

Update 3/6/09: From the comments it has become glaringly obvious that some doctors claim membership in a priesthood of knowledge, and that others are not allowed to challenge the priests. When they do, the priests resort to insults and personal attacks and appeals to the authority of the anointed. It seems that some of these doctors have never heard of the abundant evidence that statin drugs could have detrimental effects on brain function, and that their knowledge of these drugs comes mainly from pharmaceutical salesmen. So I found a few more links. It turns out that there is abundant evidence that statins may not only cause memory loss, but cancer as well, low cholesterol being in both cases responsible.

From Science (which I trust isn't too lightweight a journal):

Synapses are regions where neurons meet and communicate. But how is their formation regulated in the developing and adult brain? As Smith and Barres explain in their Perspective, the answer could not be simpler. It turns out that, at least in the culture dish, a type of glial cell called an astrocyte produces the molecule cholesterol, which is taken up by neurons and then directs formation of synapses perhaps by regulating vital signaling pathways (Mauch et al.).

Low cholesterol and dementia (Dr. Barry Groves):

The researchers found a significant linear association between the level of blood cholesterol and measures of verbal fluency, attention, concentration, abstract reasoning, and a composite score measuring multiple cognitive domains. Participants with 'desirable' cholesterol levels of less than 5.2 mmol/L (200 mg/dL) performed significantly less well than participants with cholesterol levels higher than 6.25 mmol/L (240 mg/dL). Dr. Penelope K. Elias from Boston University said that 'It is not entirely surprising that lower cholesterol levels were associated with moderately lower levels of cognitive function, given [that] cholesterol is important in brain function.'

In view of this evidence, why on earth are the government so keen to get everyone on cholesterol-lowering drugs?

Low levels of good cholesterol linked to memory loss, dementia risk(From The American Heart Association.)

Statins have unexpected effect on pool of powerful brain cells (Rochester University). For "unexpected", read "bad".

Cancer incidence after statin treatment of elderly people at risk of vascular disease. The note in the lower right of the graph says that the hazard ratio is 1.25 for takers of pravastatin, i.e. they were 25% more likely to come down with cancer than those taking placebo, this after a mere four years of taking the drug. Since many doctors will presumably want their patients on statins for life, the odds of getting cancer could become much greater over many years. (BMJ).

Summary points

US recommendations for low density lipoprotein cholesterol concentrations could put most of the Western world's adult population on statins

Doses of statins would have to be more than eight times higher than currently used

Increasing the dose of atorvastatin by eight times does not lower total mortality

Adverse side effects in clinical trials are under-reported

Any reduction in non-fatal events may be outweighed by more numerous and more severe adverse effects