Senior citizens who are taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs when they are admitted to the hospital with serious head injuries are 76 percent more likely to survive than those who don't take the drugs, says a Johns Hopkins study. Older patients taking statins also had a 13 percent better chance of being functional one year following their injuries.
The findings may lead to a specific treatment for traumatic brain injury — none currently exists — and could increase the use of a popular drug that's already taken by more than four of 10 senior citizens in the United States.
"We don’t think it’s the lowering of cholesterol that’s helping the brain recover in those who have been taking statins," says Eric B. Schneider, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Center for Surgical Trials and Outcomes Research, and the study’s leader. "We think there are other, less well-known properties of statins that are causing the benefits we seem to be seeing here."
Schneider and his team studied 523 patients over the age of 65 who had experienced moderate to severe brain damage. Those who were using statins at the time of their injury were 76 percent less likely to die than those who weren't taking statins. However, those who were taking statins but had documented heart disease at the time of their brain injury didn't get the same benefits.
One possibility for statins' brain-protecting effects is that they appear to curb the body's immune response. Once injured, the body launches efforts to repair the damage, but it attacks healthy tissue in addition to damaged tissue. Statins may moderate that reaction. In addition, statins might help keep dangerous chemical by-products and excess white blood cells from crossing the blood-brain barrier and doing additional damage.
