Serious Lipitor Side Effects: Memory Loss, Heart Attack and More

Lipitor has been hailed by many physicians as something of a miracle drug due to its ability to significantly lower cholesterol levels.

I have had high cholesterol since 1998, and have, until recently, taken several different statin drugs to lower it, including Lipitor.

Because high cholesterol levels are associated with heart attacks in many patients, doctors have been rushing to prescribe statin drugs such as Lipitor in hopes of preventing cardiac incidents. But at what cost?

Some of the more serious side effects of Lipitor and other statin drugs include:

A breakdown in muscle tissue, leading to muscle aches and weakness. (Remember that the heart is a muscle!)

Dizziness, neuropathy (nerve damage), depression, and yes, heart failure. A drug that is supposed to help prevent heart failure is, in fact, associated with an increased risk of the very condition it is meant to prevent. There is no research showing WHY the hearts are failing, but a good guess might be that statin drugs cause muscle breakdown.

Erectile dysfunction in men.

Liver damage and failure.

Perhaps the most alarming side effect of all is serious memory loss. So serious in some patients that they are at first misdiagnosed with early to advanced stages of Alzheimer's Disease. For me, this was the primary reason that I stopped taking all statin drugs. I began noticing that I was forgetting phone numbers that I dialed daily for years (such as my aunt's number, which has not changed in over forty years).

Some patients suffering memory loss as a result of Lipitor and other statin drugs even forget their own names, or the faces of loved ones. Their behavior can become erratic, even hostile, and they have been found wandering around their neighborhoods, unsure of who they are or where they are.

The memory loss issue is a major one, as not all of it can always be reversed. It depends very much on how long the medication has been a part of the patient's daily regimen, and the size of the dose.