What’s the latest news among people taking statins, or drugs that are marketed as cholesterol lowering agents? Pfizer Inc.’s Lipitor, the world’s best-selling statin, with revenues of $12.6 billion in 2007, causes some women to experience what researchers are referring to as serious cognitive side effects, reports reports The Wall Street Journal.

“This drug makes women stupid,” Orli Etingin, vice chairman of medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, declared at a recent luncheon discussion sponsored by Project A.L.S. to raise awareness of gender issues and the brain. Dr. Etingin, who is also founder and director of the Iris Cantor Women’s Health Center in New York, told those present about a typical patient in her 40s, who after taking Lipitor was unable to concentrate or recall words. Tests found nothing amiss, but when the woman stopped taking Lipitor, the symptoms vanished. When she resumed taking Lipitor, they returned.

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Note: Much of the analysis in this paper draws from the book “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes, and the article would not have been possible without his research.

At the age of 64, after a morning playing golf, President Dwight D Eisenhower had his first heart attack. As Pulitzer Prize winning author Gary Taubes describes in his book “Good Calories, Bad Calories”, Eisenhower’s heart attack “constituted a learning experience on coronary artery disease (CAD).” After the event, his doctors, considered the top experts in the field, gave the public a “lucid and authoritative description of the disease itself,” followed by twice-daily press conferences held on the president’s condition. Soon, most of America, particularly middle-aged men, were intently aware of the dogma surrounding heart disease, dogma that continues to persist today – namely the notion that dietary fat and cholesterol are major factors in the development of CAD. Like much of the rest of the nation, Eisenhower began to avidly lower his fat and cholesterol intake.

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