Your body needs cholesterol in order to create a healthy balance of cell membranes and hormones that help you function on a daily basis.
However, having bad cholesterol (LDL) can cause an unhealthy build-up of plaque in your arteries.
To help lower your bad cholesterol levels, your doctor might recommend statins.
Statins are a class of drugs used to lower cholesterol levels by inhibiting the enzyme HMG-CoA reductase, which plays a central role in the production of cholesterol in the liver. Your liver produces about 70 percent of total cholesterol in your body.
A recent study looked at how the statin drugs might influence your aggression levels and found that men who take statins become less aggressive while women become more aggressive.
Why is that?
Listen in as Beatrice Alexandra Golomb, MD, PhD, shares the recent study that might show a link between cholesterol drugs and aggression.
Do Statin Drugs Influence Your Aggression Levels?
New research suggests that statin drugs may impact aggression levels in both men and women.
Additional Info
- Segment Number: 1
- Audio File: ER_101/1528er5a.mp3
- Featured Speaker: Beatrice Alexandra Golomb, MD, PhD
- Organization: UC San Diego
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Guest Bio:
Beatrice Alexandra Golomb, MD, PhD is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Her background includes a BS in physics, summa cum laude (with graduate fellowship offers in physics to Harvard and Cal Tech, at age 19); an MD and PhD at UC San Diego (during which she worked in the lab of, and gave vaulting lessons to Francis Crick); a postdoctoral fellowship in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholarship at RAND/UCLA and receipt of a Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Physican Faculty Scholar Award.
She is a member of the Cochrane Adverse Effects Methods Group and has been named a foreign fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. She has two decades experience as an internist and primary care physician.
Her interests encompass research methods and inference-from-evidence, and the balance of treatment risks and benefits. They also include relation of oxidative stress and mitochondrial function/ cell energy to health, behavior, illness, medication effects, nutrition and aging, and environmental injury.
She is best known for her work on statins, Gulf War illness, placebos and chocolate. Her work has been featured numerous times in such venues as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek and the Economist, as well as on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. - Length (mins): 10
- Waiver Received: No
- Host: Leigh Vinocur, MD
Published in
The Dr. Leigh Vinocur Show
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