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Over half (51 percent) of respondents reported that they either didn’t believe or weren’t sure that the data recorded in their EMRs was accurate.

The healthcare industry’s growing reliance on clinical data and EHRs requires that patients are educated and empowered about data collection, sharing, and use, the report authors noted. Bridging knowledge gaps between health systems and patients has the potential to significantly improve care, medical research, and health equity.

He argues that the real object of healing is not the body, but the mind.  A plastic surgeon is a “psychologist with a scalpel in his hand.” This idea led Pitanguy to argue for the “union” of cosmetic and reconstructive procedures.  In both types of surgery beauty and mental healing subtly mingle, he claims, and both benefit health.

“What is the difference between a plastic surgeon and a psychoanalyst?  The psychoanalyst knows everything but changes nothing.  The plastic surgeon knows nothing but changes everything.”

Plastic surgery gained legitimacy in the early 20th century by limiting itself to reconstructive operations.  The “beauty doctor” was a term of derision.  But as techniques improved they were used for cosmetic improvements.  Missing, however, was a valid diagnosis. Concepts like psychoanalyst Alfred Adler’s inferiority complex — and later low self-esteem — provided a missing link.

Victorians saw a cleft palate as a defect that built character. For us it hinders self-realization and merits corrective surgery.  This shift reflects a new attitude towards appearance and mental health: the notion that at least some defects cause unfair suffering and social stigma is now widely accepted. But Brazilian surgeons take this reasoning a step further.  Cosmetic surgery is a consumer service in most of the world.  In Brazil it is becoming, as Ester put it, a “necessary vanity.”

Pitanguy, whose patients often have mixed African, indigenous and European ancestry, stresses that aesthetic ideals vary by epoch and ethnicity.  What matters are not objective notions of beauty, but how the patient feels.  As his colleague says, the job of the plastic surgeon is to simply “follow desires.”

Patients are on average younger than they were 20 years ago.  They often request minor changes to become, as one surgeon said, “more perfect.”

The growth of plastic surgery thus reflects a new way of working not only on the suffering mind, but also on the erotic body.  Unlike fashion’s embrace of playful dissimulation and seduction, this beauty practice instead insists on correcting precisely measured flaws.  Plastic surgery may contribute to a biologized view of sex where pleasure and fantasy matter less than the anatomical “truth” of the bare body.

It is not coincidental that Brazil has not only high rates of plastic surgery, but also Cesarean sections (70 percent of deliveries in some private hospitals), tubal ligations,  and other surgeries for women. Some women see elective surgeries as part of a modern standard of care, more or less routine for the middle class, but only sporadically available to the poor.

When a good life is defined through the ability to buy goods then rights may be reinterpreted to mean not equality before the law, but equality in the market. 

Beauty is unfair: the attractive enjoy privileges and powers gained without merit.  As such it can offend egalitarian values.  Yet while attractiveness is a quality “awarded” to those who don’t morally deserve it, it can also grant power to those excluded from other systems of privilege.  It is a kind of “double negative”: a form of power that is unfairly distributed but which can disturb other unfair hierarchies.  For this reason it may have democratic appeal.  In poor urban areas beauty often has a similar importance for girls as soccer (or basketball) does for boys: it promises an almost magical attainment of recognition, wealth or power.

For many consumers attractiveness is essential to economic and sexual competition, social visibility, and mental well being.  This “value” of appearance may be especially clear for those excluded from other means of social ascent.  For the poor beauty is often a form of capital that can be exchanged for other benefits, however small, transient, or unconducive to collective change.

The treatment helped 13.4% of patients with their addiction, compared with 2.5% of the placebo group.

This medication therapy provides another tool for doctors to try with patients.

"As we understand the complexity of the human brain, it becomes very much of a magical thinking that one pill will solve the problem of addiction,"

The treatment regimen in the trial combined two medications that have been studied separately for treating methamphetamine addiction with limited success.

This clinical trial was successful enough that the National Institute on Drug Addiction's Volkow says she expects to move forward toward securing FDA approval.

lack of medical treatments for those addicted to meth has complicated efforts to curb demand for the drug.

The human cost has been catastrophic. Researchers say overdose deaths linked to meth increased fourfold over the last decade.

Even users who don't overdose often experience damage to the heart and other tissues, and can see their lives spiral out of control.

"For heroin users, there's methadone, there's suboxone. I just wonder why we haven't researched [treatments for] this drug yet,"

"It's about evidence-based care, it's about empathy and it's about survivability,"

“The social isolation since then, over all this time, it just got to him,”

“This is a charming, funny kid, also sensitive and anxious,” she said. “He couldn’t find a job; he couldn’t really go out. And he started using marijuana again, and Xanax.”

The teenager’s frustration finally boiled over this month, when he deliberately cut himself.

The doctors sent him home, she said, “with no support, no therapy, nothing.”

Surveys and statistics show that for young people who are anxious by nature, or feeling emotionally fragile already, the pandemic and its isolation have pushed them to the brink

Rates of suicidal thinking and behavior are up by 25 percent or more from similar periods in 2019, according to a just-published analysis of surveys of young patients coming into the emergency room.

For these teenagers, there aren’t many places to turn.

Finally, when a crisis hits, many of these teenagers end up in the local emergency department — the one place desperate families so often go for help.

“This is a national crisis we’re facing,”

For the young people coming undone, however, pandemic life presents unusual challenges, pediatricians say

“What parents and children are consistently reporting is an increase in all symptoms — a child who was a little anxious before the pandemic became very anxious over this past year,”

“This giant boy, crying — it’s terrible to see.” The young man has had panic attacks, twice followed by a blackout. During one, he fell and injured his face.

These young people do not necessarily qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis, nor are they “traumatized” in the strict sense of having had a life-threatening experience (or the perception of one).

Rather, they are trying to manage an interruption in their

The result is grief, but grief without a name or a specific cause, an experience some psychologists call “ambiguous loss.”

“Everything that used to be familiar and give structure to their lives, and predictability, and normalcy, is gone,” said Sharon Young, a therapist in Hendersonville. “Kids need all these things even more than adults do, and it’s hard for them to feel emotionally safe when they’re no longer there.”

Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, has an emergency department that is a decent size for a pediatric hospital, with capacity for 62 children or adolescents

“This was huge problem pre-pandemic,” said Dr. David Axelson, chief of psychiatry and behavioral health at the hospital. “We were seeing a rise in emergency department visits for mental health problems in kids, specifically for suicidal thinking and self-harm. Our emergency department was overwhelmed with it, having to board kids on the medical unit while waiting for psych beds.”

“We have to say no,” Dr. Axelson said.

Like many other parents, she is now looking after an unstable child and wondering where to go next. A drug rehab program may be needed, as well as regular therapy.

“Covid has put our system under a microscope in terms of the things that don’t work,”

“We had a shaky system of care in pediatric mental health prior to this pandemic, and now we have all these added stressors on it, all these kids coming in for pandemic-related issues. Hospitals everywhere are scrambling to adjust.”

lockdowns in Britain dragged on and no job emerged, the young man grew cynical and self-conscious, his sister Yasmin said.

Mr. Morgan was “exceptionally careful” about her health.

But days before the end of his quarantine last month, Mr. Morgan, 25, took his own life.

“He just sounded so deflated,” his sister said of their last conversation, adding that he said he felt imprisoned and longed to go outside.

“The cost of the pandemic was my brother’s life,” she said. “It’s not just people dying in a hospital — it’s people dying inside.”

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More than 2.7 million people have died from the coronavirus — and at least 126,000 in Britain alone

Those numbers are a tangible count of the pandemic’s cos

public health officials in some areas that have seen a surge of adolescent suicides have pushed for schools to reopen, although researchers say it is too early to conclusively link restrictions to suicide rates.

But bereaved families of young people who have died during the pandemic are haunted by questions over whether lockdowns — which not only shut stores and restaurants but required people to stay home for months — played a role.

They are calling for more resources for mental health and suicide prevention.

“Mental health has become a buzzword during the pandemic, and we need to keep it that way,”

While people may have felt a sense of togetherness during the first lockdowns, that feeling began to wear thin for some as it became clear that restrictions were hitting disadvantaged groups, including many young people, harder.

“If you are a young person, you are looking for hope,”

“But the job market is going to be constrained, and opportunities to build your life are going to be slimmer.”

“Imagine a young person in a small room, who takes their course online and has limited social life due to restrictions,”

“They may be tempted to consume more drugs or drink more alcohol, and may have less physical activity, all of which can contribute to symptoms of depression, anxiety and poor sleep.”

“We would ask him if he was depressed, and he would say, ‘Depressed? I don’t know what depressed is, I don’t think I am. I feel bored, but I don’t feel depressed,’”

“With the pandemic, the things that spiced his life, that made it worth going to school, were gone,” he added.

After a series of lockdowns in Britain last year, one suicide hotline for young people, Papyrus, saw its calls increase by 25 percent, in line with an increase of about 20 percent each year.

“Lockdown put Lily in physical and emotional situations she would never have in normal times.”

“It’s OK for a young child to fall over and let their parents know that their knee hurts,” Ms. Arkwright said. “This same attitude needs to be extended to mental health.”

People should be praised for adapting and finding resilience during these difficult times, Mr. Flynn said. “Even the need to reach out to a help-line shows resilience,” he said, adding that considering the circumstances, many people were doing “really well.”

In states across the country, demand for the vaccine has far outweighed supply

Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported any serious health problems.

Other states have decided to remain focused exclusively on vaccinating health care workers and nursing home residents before opening up to a wider swath of the public.

Life will return to normal only when society as a whole gains enough protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they’ll only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens at most in the first couple months.

At least 28 states and Washington, D.C., have begun vaccinating older people, a New York Times survey shows, in many cases marking a shift in earlier plans that had put medical workers and nursing home residents at the front of the line for Covid-19 inoculations.

“I couldn’t hug her,” Ms. Johnson said. “We didn’t share food. We each brought our own sandwich. It was just surreal.”

“Happiness is hard to know. It’s hard to measure,”

“We don’t have a lot of great data about how people are doing.”

to parse our national mental health through the prism of our online life.

that stockpile of information towered as high as it does now, in the summer of 2020

, Twitter reported a 34 percent increase in daily average user growth.

has gathered a random 10 percent of all public tweets, every day, across a dozen languages.

Twitter included “terrorist,” “violence” and “racist.” This was about a week after George Floyd was killed, near the start of the protests that would last all summe

the pandemic, the Hedonometer’s sadness readings have set multiple records. This year, “there was a full month — and we never see this — there was a full month of days that the Hedonometer was reading sadder than the Boston Marathon day,”

“These digital traces are markers that we’re not aware of, but they leave marks that tell us the degree to which you are avoiding things, the degree to which you are connected to people,”

one of the challenges of this line of research is that language itself is always evolving — and algorithms are notoriously bad at discerning context.

they were able to help predict which ones might develop postpartum depression, based on their posts before the birth of their babies.

Using data from social media for the study of mental health also helps address the WEIRD problem:

psychology research is often exclusively composed of subjects who are Western, Educated, and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries.

We’re now able to look at a much more diverse variety of mental health experiences.”

but also anxiety, depression, stress and suicidal thoughts. Unsurprisingly, she found that all these levels were significantly higher than during the same months of 2019.

is really a representative place to check the state of the general population’s mental health.

argues that in the rush to embrace data, many researchers ignore the distorting effects of the platforms themselves.

emotionally invested in the content we are presented with, coaxed toward remaining in a certain mental state.

The closest we get to looking at national mental health otherwise is through surveys like the one Gallup performs

the lowest rates of life satisfaction this year in over a decade, including during the 2008 recession

I have never been more exhausted at the end of the day than I am now,” said Michael Garfinkle, a psychoanalyst in New York.

There are so many contenders to consider: was it Thursday, March 12, the day after Tom Hanks announced he was sick and the N.B.A. announced it was canceled? Was it Monday, June 1, the day peaceful protesters were tear gassed so that President Trump could comfortably stroll to his Bible-wielding photo op?

"The science tells [us] when [we're] on the phone while driving, it is a high-risk activity -- very, very risky,"

Even hands-free phones appear to contribute to unsafe driving

These sorts of injuries, known as repetitive strain injuries or a repetitive motion disorders, are sometimes minor. But they can also lead to serious medical problems.

Our reliance on our cell phones may actually be "training" some of us to believe it is vibrating when it is not. In the case of cell phones, people are rewarded when they pick up their calls and read their incoming text messages, which causes them to pick up their cell phones more and more frequently.

The sores and blisters that some experience from too much texting and typing have earned monikers such as "BlackBerry thumb." And while the sore thumbs may seem like a new phenomenon, medical experts say there is a rational explanation for this modern-day nuisance.

What they found was that when children were on the cell phones, their attention to traffic -- the number of times a participant looked right or left -- went down 20 percent. The risk of getting hit by a car, or the number of close calls, went up 43 percent

According to statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/noise/index.htm), about 12.5 percent of children and adolescents 6 and 19 years old and 17 percent of adults between 20 and 69 years of age have suffered permanent damage to their hearing from excessive exposure to noise. In total, this accounts for more than 30 million people.

Sounds louder than 85 decibels can damage hearing. Normal conversation is about 60 decibels, and stereo headphones out of our MP3-enabled devices often reach 100 decibels.

It’s not that young women aren’t feminists, or don’t care about sexism. For college-age women — Mr. Sanders’s female base — sexism tends to be linked to sex.

Young women are neither ungrateful to their feminist foremothers nor complacent; rather, they are activists for feminist causes that reflect their needs.

College-educated women see only a tiny pay gap in their early- and mid-20s, making 97 cents for every dollar earned by their male colleagues.

That experience starts to change a few more years into the work force. By 35, those same college-educated women are making 15 percent less than their male peers. Women’s earnings peak between ages 35 and 44 and then plateau, while men’s continue to rise.

When women have children, they’re penalized: They’re considered less competent, they’re less likely to be hired for a new job and they’re paid less

one of the few female partners always seemed to be in charge of ordering lunch

I listened as some of my male colleagues opined on the need to marry a woman who would stay home with the children — that wasn’t sexist, they insisted, because it wasn’t that they thought only women should stay home; it was just that somebody had to, and the years in which they planned on having children would be crucial ones for their own careers.

I watched as men with little or irrelevant experience were hired and promoted, because they had such great ideas, or they fit in better. “We want a woman,” the conclusion seemed to be, “just not this woman.”

in the now-common refrain about Hillary Clinton: “I want a woman president, just not this woman president.”

a 19-year-old aspiring lawyer who is volunteering for Mr. Sanders today will work for firms with more female partners and live in a world where the wage gap has shrunk. But the trends show that her experience in a decade is unlikely to be that different from mine.

Many more women over 25 are in the work force than those under, and women over 25 also do about twice as much unpaid domestic work as their younger counterparts.

For the many women who live at the center of that time crush, Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on the wage gap, paid family leave and universal prekindergarten may be particularly appealing. Mr. Sanders, who also supports paid leave and universal pre-K, takes a different rhetorical tone, usually stressing affordable higher education and universal health care.

Child care is just as expensive in many places as sending a kid to public university, but a college kid can get a part-time job. A toddler can’t.”

There are many other reasons women in the 30-and-over cohort may lean toward Mrs. Clinton. They’ve already seen promises of revolutionary change fall short. They may prefer a candidate with a progressive ideology but a more restrained, and potentially more effective, strategy for putting that ideology in place.

If it’s not this woman, this year, then who and when?

Compared with five years ago, both citizens and scientists are less upbeat about the scientific enterprise. Citizens are still broadly positive about the place of U.S. scientific achievements and its impact on society, but slightly more are negative than five years ago. And, while a majority of scientists think it is a good time for science, they are less upbeat than they were five years ago.

While a majority of the public sees U.S. scientific achievements in positive terms, the share saying U.S. scientific achievements are the best in the world or above average is down 11 points to 54% today, compared with 65% in 2009.

The largest differences between the public and the AAAS scientists are found in beliefs about the safety of eating genetically modified (GM) foods.

Theranos, which she started after dropping out of Stanford at age 19, has raised more than $400 million in venture capital and has been valued at $9 billion, which makes Ms. Holmes’s 50 percent stake worth $4.5 billion. Forbes put her on the cover of its Forbes 400 issue, ranking her No. 121 on the list of wealthiest Americans.

Thanks to an investigative article in The Wall Street Journal this month by John Carreyrou, one of the company’s central claims, and the one most exciting to many investors and doctors, is being called into question. Theranos has acknowledged it was only running a limited number of tests on a microsample of blood using its finger-prick technology. Since then, it said it had stopped using its proprietary methods on all but one relatively simple test for herpes.

“The constant was that nobody had any idea how this works or even if it works,” Mr. Loria told me this week. “People in medicine couldn’t understand why the media and technology worlds were so in thrall to her.

that so many eminent authorities — from Henry Kissinger, who had served on the company’s board; to prominent investors like the Oracle founder Larry Ellison; to the Cleveland Clinic — appear to have embraced Theranos with minimal scrutiny is a testament to the ageless power of a great story.

Ms. Holmes seems to have perfectly executed the current Silicon Valley playbook: Drop out of a prestigious college to pursue an entrepreneurial vision; adopt an iconic uniform; embrace an extreme diet; and champion a humanitarian mission, preferably one that can be summed up in one catchy phrase.

She stays relentlessly on message, as a review of her numerous conference and TV appearances make clear, while at the same time saying little of scientific substance.

The natural human tendency to fit complex facts into a simple, compelling narrative has grown stronger in the digital age of 24/7 news and social media,

“We’re deluged with information even as pressure has grown to make snap decisions,”

“People see a TED talk. They hear this amazing story of a 30-something-year-old woman with a wonder procedure. They see the Cleveland Clinic is on board. A switch goes off and they make an instant decision that everything is fine. You see this over and over: Really smart and wealthy people start to believe completely implausible things with 100 percent certainty.”

Ms. Holmes’s story also fits into a broader narrative underway in medicine, in which new health care entrepreneurs are upending ossified hospital practices with the goal of delivering more effective and patient-oriented care.

as a medical technology company, Theranos has bumped up against something else: the scientific method, which puts a premium on verification over narrative.

“You have to subject yourself to peer review. You can’t just go in a stealthy mode and then announce one day that you’ve got technology that’s going to disrupt the world.”

Professor Yeo said that he and his colleagues wanted to see data and testing in independent labs. “We have a small army of people ready and willing to test Theranos’s products if they’d ask us,” he said. “And that can be done without revealing any trade secrets.”

“Every other company in this field has gone through peer review,” said Mr. Cherny of Evercore. “Why hold back so much of the platform if your goal is the greater good of humanity?”

Abbott’s new blood test may serve as an objective tool to help doctors triage TBI patients, because it relies on molecular signatures in the blood rather than on murkier clues, such as patient interviews.

often use a series of screening questionnaires, physical examinations and CT scans to take pictures of the brain in order to evaluate TBI. However, experts agree these techniques aren’t perfect and there is no objective way to reliably evaluate TBI.

Aside from reducing health care costs, it can save people from unnecessary radiation that has been shown to increase the risk of cancer.

Despite the benefits, experts agree that physicians cannot rely entirely on this diagnostic test, stating it will only serve to supplement clinical judgment.

"The game-changing innovation of having a tool like this is that, as it becomes more widely used, I believe we will identify more people with TBI that’s more subtle, that could be life-altering."

"this assumption about people outside of the 'First World' — that they lived really different lives, the assumption they were poor, they should be happy to eat every day. As if we don't have the same value as humans."

"I think it's a very antiquated and offensive term."

"There is no 'Third World.' There were the oppressed and the oppressors,"

The oppressors, he says, often took resources from the countries they colonized

Yet as Wednesday's events made clear, "Third World" is often the first term that pops into Westerners' minds when they try to characterize less well-off, troubled countries.

The idea of a world divided into three domains dates back to the 1950s when the Cold War was just starting. It was Western capitalism versus Soviet socialism

The "First World" consisted of the U.S., Western Europe and their allies. The "Second World" was the so-called communist bloc: the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and friends. The remaining nations, which aligned with neither group, were assigned to the "Third World."

"That's the 'Fourth World,' " Farmer says, referring to parts of the United States and other wealthy nations where health and economic problems loom large.

Because many countries in the Third World were impoverished, the term came to be used to refer to countries where poverty is rampant, where health care is inadequate, and where democracy does not flourish.

Who is to say which part of the world is "first"? Plus, the Soviet Union doesn't even exist anymore.

And it's not like the "First World" is the best world in every way. It has pockets of deep urban and rural poverty,

"Although the phrase was widely used, it was never clear whether it was a clear category of analysis, or simply a convenient and rather vague label for an imprecise collection of states in the second half of the 20th century and some of the common problems that they faced,"

"Being called a 'developing country' gives me a chance to improve." He hopes that one day India will go "a few steps beyond what 'developed countries' have achieved."

"I dislike the term 'developing world' because it assumes a hierarchy between countries"

"It paints a picture of Western societies as ideal but there are many social problems in these societies as well. It also perpetuates stereotypes about people who come from the so-called 'developing world' as backward, lazy, ignorant, irresponsible."

There are extremely wealthy people in poor countries, for example. Kenya has slums and neighborhoods where real estate prices rival any nation. It's part of a growing trend of income inequality around the world, Over notes.

So income levels tell you something — but not everything. Over would like to see classifications based on a combination of income and equality.

With shortages of everything from auto parts to generic medicines and production delays in things like iPhones and Diet Coke, a great deal of pain is coming from the closing of Chinese factories. That proliferating damage has central banks and financial analysts talking about a global recession in the coming months.

As a baseline, several factors work against the United States. China’s authoritarian government can quarantine entire cities or order people off the streets in a way that would be hard to imagine in America, presumably giving China an advantage in slowing the spread of the disease. In addition, a large share of American workers lack paid sick days and millions lack health care coverage, so people may be less likely to stay home or to get proper medical care. And 41 percent of China’s population lives outside urban areas, more than twice the share in the United States. Diseases generally spread faster in urban areas.

When people pull back from interacting with others because of their fear of disease, the things they stop doing will frequently affect much bigger industries in the United States.

People may stop attending American sporting events. There have even been calls for the N.C.A.A. to play its March Madness college basketball tournament without an audience. But sports is a huge business in the United States. People spend upward of 10 times as much on sporting events as they do in China.

Who wants to go to the dentist or the hospital during an outbreak if a visit isn’t necessary? Yet health spending is 17 percent of the U.S. economy — more than triple the proportion spent in China.

But over all, the United States is substantially more reliant on services than China is.

A major coronavirus epidemic in the United States might be like a big snowstorm that shuts down most economic activity and social interaction only until the snow is cleared away. But the coronavirus could be a “Snowmaggedon-style storm” that hits the whole country and lasts for months.

The premium increases would be felt most by middle-class consumers who do not qualify for federal aid with either their premiums or their out-of-pocket costs.

“It used to take me an hour to memorize 20 words. Now I can learn, like, 40 new words in 20 minutes.”

“I don’t know if it makes you smarter. But when you get to each new level on the math and reading tasks, it definitely builds up your self-confidence.”

. “What you care about is not an intelligence test score, but whether your ability to do an important task has really improved. That’s a chain of evidence that would be really great to have. I haven’t seen it.”

Still,a new and growing body of scientific evidence indicates that cognitive training can be effective, including that offered by commercial services.

He looked at 340 middle-school students who spent two hours a week for a semester using LearningRx exercises in their schools’ computer labs and an equal number of students who received no such training. Those who played the online games, Dr. Hill found, not only improved significantly on measures of cognitive abilities compared to their peers, but also on Virginia’s annual Standards of Learning exam.

I’ve had some kids who not only reported that they had very big changes in the classroom, but when we bring them back in the laboratory to do neuropsychological testing, we also see great changes. They show increases that would be highly unlikely to happen just by chance.”

where crosswords and Sudoku are intended to be a diversion, the games here give that same kind of reward, only they’re designed to improve your brain, your memory, your problem-solving skills.”

More than 40 games are offered by Lumosity. One, the N-back, is based on a task developed decades ago by psychologists. Created to test working memory, the N-back challenges users to keep track of a continuously updated list and remember which item appeared “n” times ago.

The statin trials, which involved tens of thousands of people, found no more muscle aches, the most common complaint, in patients who took statins than in those who took placebos.

The widely held belief that statins affect memory also has not been borne out in clinical trials, said Dr. Jane Armitage of the University of Oxford. She and her colleagues studied memory problems in 20,000 patients randomly assigned to take a statin or a placebo. “There was absolutely no difference,” she said.

In a separate study, they looked at mood and sleep patterns and again found statins had no effect. Another study, in Scotland, detailed cognitive testing of older people taking statins or a placebo, and also found no effect.