Statins may provide protection against depression

Philadelphia, May 17, 2022 – Statins have been hailed as a wonder drug; the cholesterol-lowering drugs have been prescribed to tens of millions of people since their approval in the late 1980s to prevent heart attack and stroke. But the drugs may yet have additional benefits, some research has hinted, including on mental health. Now, a new study examines the influence of statins on emotional bias, a marker for risk of depression. The study appears in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier.

Researchers led by Amy Gillespie, PhD, at the University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, conducted the online observational study from April 2020 through February 2021, at the height of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, when global stress levels were elevated and the incidence of psychiatric disorders spiked.

Over 2000 participants in the UK recorded information about their current psychiatric symptoms, medications, and other lifestyle factors. They also performed cognitive tasks meant to measure memory, reward, and emotion processing, which are linked to depression vulnerability. One task required participants to identify the emotional expressions of faces, which displayed varying degrees of fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, or fear.

The vast majority of subjects (84%) were not taking either medication, but a small group were taking only statins (4%), only a different class of anti-hypertension medication (6%), or both (5%).

Participants taking statins were less likely to recognize fearful or angry faces and more likely to report them as positive, indicating they had reduced negative emotional bias.

Dr. Gillespie said, “We found that taking a statin medication was associated with significantly lower levels of negative emotional bias when interpreting facial expressions; this was not seen with other medications, such as blood pressure medications.”

“We know that reducing negative emotional bias can be important for the treatment of depression,” said Dr. Gillespie. “Our findings are important as they provide evidence that statins may provide protection against depression. Of particular note, we saw these results during the high-stress context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings also provide the first potential psychological explanation of statins’ mental health benefits,” in that they seem to affect emotion processing. It remains unclear exactly how statins could protect against mental illness, but one possibility is that they may work through anti-inflammatory mechanisms, which have also been implicated in depression.

John Krystal, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, said of the work, "Statins are among the most commonly prescribed medications based on their ability to prevent heart attacks and strokes. These new data raise the possibility that some of their positive effects on health could be mediated by the effects of these drugs on the brain that promote emotional resilience."

“Researchers should prioritize investigating the possible use of statins as a preventative intervention for depression. Before use in clinical practice, it is important that future research confirms the potential psychological benefits of statins through controlled, randomized clinical trials,” Dr. Gillespie concluded. 

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Notes for editors
The article is "Associations between statin use and negative affective bias during COVID-19: an observational, longitudinal UK study investigating depression vulnerability," by Amy Gillespie, Chloe Wigg, Indra van Assche, Susannah Murphy, Catherine Harmer (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2022.03.009). It appears as an Article in Press in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier.

Copies of this paper are available to credentialed journalists upon request; please contact Rhiannon Bugno at Biol.Psych@sobp.org or +1 254 522 9700. Journalists wishing to interview the authors may contact Amy Gillespie, PhD, at amy.gillespie@psych.ox.ac.uk.

The authors’ affiliations and disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available in the article.

John H. Krystal, MD, is Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA, Chief of Psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and a research psychiatrist at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. His disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available here.

About Biological Psychiatry
Biological Psychiatry is the official journal of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, whose purpose is to promote excellence in scientific research and education in fields that investigate the nature, causes, mechanisms and treatments of disorders of thought, emotion, or behavior. In accord with this mission, this peer-reviewed, rapid-publication, international journal publishes both basic and clinical contributions from all disciplines and research areas relevant to the pathophysiology and treatment of major psychiatric disorders.

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