Statins Reduce Head Injury Deaths

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.

The next step, says Scheneider, is a clinical trial to see if statins administered in the emergency room to brain-injured patients who were not taking statins at the time of their injury could help them recover. "If you get this drug into people very quickly after the injury, we may get the same effect as if the drug were in the body before the accident," he says.

Seniors aren't the only people at high risk for sustaining a head injury. According to brainandspinalcord.org, 1.4 million people in the United States experience a traumatic brain injury each year. Of those, 50,000 die. In addition, approximately 5.3 Americans live with a traumatic brain injury.

Sports-loving children are at high risk. Of the 4.4 million American children who play tackle football, more than 500,000 suffer a concussion each year, according to a report by the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. And a study conducted by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research found a rate of dementia 19 times the normal rate in former National Football League players ages 30 through 49. The cause is believed to be the high number of concussions they sustain during their careers.

"Historically there is nothing you can give someone with a brain injury to limit its effect," Schneider says. "Perhaps this will prove to be that, but much more study is needed."

"At this time, we cannot recommend that statins be provided as a treatment," Schneider says. "Not everyone should be on statins. There are unknowns and there are downsides, including that some people who take them develop serious muscle disorders."