Statins, Metformin and Calcium Blockers may help Schizophrenia

An interesting correlation between use of these medications and reduced symptoms in a large scale study.

One proposed mechanism is a reduction in inflammation.

Neuroscience News :

https://neurosciencenews.com/statins-mental-health-10473/

SMC reaction :

http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/e...king-at-statins-and-serious-mental-illnesses/

 

Perhaps this will prove to be helpful to the following growing number of patients (from a new article in the New Yorker)....

In one of the most fascinating sections of “Tell Your Children,” he sits down with Erik Messamore, a psychiatrist who specializes in neuropharmacology and in the treatment of schizophrenia. Messamore reports that, following the recent rise in marijuana use in the U.S. (it has almost doubled in the past two decades, not necessarily as the result of legal reforms), he has begun to see a new kind of patient: older, and not from the marginalized communities that his patients usually come from. These are otherwise stable middle-class professionals. Berenson writes, “A surprising number of them seemed to have used only cannabis and no other drugs before their breaks. The disease they’d developed looked like schizophrenia, but it had developed later—and their prognosis seemed to be worse. Their delusions and paranoia hardly responded to antipsychotics.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/14/is-marijuana-as-safe-as-we-think

 

My prediction...

This gives schizophrenia (from the sufferers point of view) an added terror. About 60% of people who are put on statins stop taking them within the first year because of the awful side effects that doctors often dismiss and tell them are all in their heads. It can't possibly be the statins, don'tcha know. But for people who are being forcibly treated in psychiatric hospitals they will have no choice and will be treated whether they like it or not. And, of course, some of the effects of statins are so severe they can kill you.

 

Wonder who funded this.