The raison d'etre of this website is to provide you with hard scientific information which may help you make informed decisions in your quest for health (so far I have blogged concise summaries of over 1,500 scientific studies and have had three books published).

My research is mainly focused on the effects of cholesterol, saturated fat and statin drugs on health. If you know anyone who is worried about their cholesterol levels and heart disease, or has been told to take statin drugs you could send them a link to this website, and to my statin or cholesterol or heart disease books.

David Evans

Independent Health Researcher

Thursday 28 February 2013

Statins may cause nightmares

This paper was published in the British Medical Journal 2006 Apr 22;332(7547):950
 
Study title and author:
Atorvastatin may cause nightmares.
Gregoor PJ.
Department of Internal Medicine, Albert Schweitzer Hospital, PO Box 444, 3300 AK Dordrecht, Netherlands. p.smakgregoor@asz.nl

This study can be accessed at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16627511

This case report relates atorvastatin to the occurrence of nightmares.

(i) A 72 year old woman was prescribed 10 mg atorvastatin once a day.
(ii) Five days after starting atorvastatin, she had extreme nightmares each night for two and a half weeks.
(iii) She stopped taking the statins for five days and no nightmares occurred.
(iv) She restarted the atorvastatin again, which promptly resulted in nightmares; these dreams again disappeared after discontinuation.

The author of this paper, Dr Peter Gregoor an internist-nephrologist at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Holland, speculates that the nightmares could be a direct effect of atorvastatin on the central nervous system.