This isn't evidence, this is marketing and anecdotes.

Things like this make me ask ... would he have been sharper without them?

That’s what I run into with my doc. “You seem sharp to me”. Yeah, I’m a resonably smart guy, but could I be better if I skip these? Slowdown may not be apparent to others, but it is to me.

Not a doctor... observed some interesting side effects with my parents on these, and would personally err on the side of caution with them. If you do come off though, do it gradually - also there are different types, so it may be worth looking into that.

"would he have been sharper without them"

Probably not? It'd be pretty unusual for an already sharp person to become sharper at age 80.

Sharper at 80 with statins or without statins was the question, not sharper at 80 than at 70.

Since he kept working for another 19 years, including supervising heart surgery on Boris Yeltsin, he probably didn't suffer much of a decrease in sharpness on statins, if any.

True, evidence looks more like this:

Two well-done meta-analyses of statins for primary prevention showed no mortality benefit. After the exclusion of four trials with serious risks of bias, the relative risk of cardiovascular events associated with statins was 0.99 (95% confidence interval, 0.90 to 1.08).2,3

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1207079

oh for pete's sake, let me google it for you: https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/Page/Document/...

Now, as for mental health, the FDA has added no warnings despite decades of use, and the mechanism of action strongly suggests statins would be protective if anything (by directly and significantly reducing vascular dementia). Here's a package insert from the FDA's website: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2012/02...

Also, I'm not raging statin advocate, the real answer is diet and exercise. The American lifestyle is a catastrophe.

Believe it or not, relying on other people to google your claims is not a good way to present evidence.

I can find confirmations and denials of literally any concept in the universe on google.

This is more a general rule when discussing medicine, not so much a denial of this specific drug.