More news from that big neurology meeting : Lipitor doesn’t help slow cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients, researchers said this week.

That’s something of a disappointment, given that it was a big, randomized study, and earlier data had showed promise. On the other hand, Alzheimer’s patients who took Lipitor at least didn’t seem to do any worse than those who took a placebo. All patients in the study also received Aricept, Pfizer’s Alzheimer’s drug.

Despite the fact that statins have been connected to anecdotal reports of memory problems, there were a few reasons to think the cholesterol drugs might help slow cognitive decline.

“We know that strokes can lead to vascular dementia,” P. Murali Doraiswamy, chief of biological psychiatry at Duke, told the Health Blog. (That includes unnoticeable strokes that affect tiny portions of the brain.) “The hope was that statins, by lowering the risk for strokes, would result in a lower risk for vascular dementia.”

What’s more, cholesterol may play an important role in the formation of the plaque that develops in the brain of Alzheimer’s patients. And animal experiments suggested that statins, which lower cholesterol, might reduce the formation of plaques in the brain, said Doraiswamy, author of the newly published book “The Alzheimer’s Action Plan.”

Doraiswamy, who has consulted for Pfizer and other drug companies, is an investigator on this federally funded trial looking at whether simvastatin (sold by Merck under the brand name Zocor) slows the progression of Alzheimer’s. Results from that study are expected soon.

There were a few potentially promising signals in the Lipitor study. The drug seemed to slow cognitive decline in men. And among a subgroup of patients who underwent brain scans, those who received the drug had less decline in the volume of the hippocampus than those who didn’t. But until the full study is published and all of the data are available, it’s hard to know what to make of those signals, Doraiswamy said.

“It’s a disappointment,” he said of the results. “The bottom-line message is, don?t use a statin just to treat Alzheimer’s.”

Photo: Associated Press

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