Will your STATIN medicine give you DEMENTIA?

[Grape Ape]

If there were no other medicine changes then I'd assume the increased cholesterol was from the difference in diet and exercise. I don't know if there is a specific test that would answer your question as to a root cause (if you do get a test showing a definitive answer I'd be curious to know it!). Hopefully the pravastatin and ezetimibe gets you to prepandemic numbers. If you don't have stents or bypass adding additional meds beyond what you're on now has rapidly diminishing returns (and poor end point data) and I think probably not worthwhile, but there's variability in how people approach that situation and some doctors do chase numbers.

Yeah, no other meds, no stents or anything.

[jwb]

I was on low dose simva for a long time.  Bloodwork pre Covid was stellar.

In 2020, it went a bit haywire.  Still unsure why, but I went from a total of 175 up to 300.  I was eating more meat, but that's a huge spike.

New cardio doc put me on rosu, and it dropped to 200 pretty quickly, without dietary changes.  Muscle cramps and spasm were too much - I have always supplemented COQ10 during all these.

Moved me to prava 40mg and it went back up to the 250 range.  So he went to prava 80 + ezetimibe.  I have to get lipid panel in a week.

I also told him if I'm going to stay on the drugs and up the dose, I'm also going to restrict sat fat to less than 10g most days.  Also started running more because that was the only thing that ever raised my good cholesterol.

I am aware of the trig ratios, apob and all the other tests. My apoB test was fine.  I am also aware of all the arguments on both sides of the statin coin.  I am following the doc right now to see.

I may get a full genetic panel evaluation if my numbers aren't good.  I really want to get to the root cause of what changed post pandemic.  I do know I did a shit ton more running back then, but unsure of the effect.

You should get your lp(a) tested for.