I’m a huge fan of patients being at the centre of their own care, and the more you learn about your condition and how it’s treated, the more you can make good decisions in conjunction with your clinical team! But there’s a lot of really unreliable information on the internet, so just be careful about what you buy into.

One of the worst untruths I see out there is that statins cause dementia. It’s just not true! I’ve never seen any proper scientific study that supports this furphy, and in fact by reducing atherosclerosis (the fatty and inflammatory plaques that can form in the walls of our arteries) in the blood vessels supplying our brains, they can prevent a common form of dementia called vascular dementia.

Secondly, that you don’t need to worry about high cholesterol or even worse, that high cholesterol is good for us! This is definitely wrong. LDL particles, which carry LDL-cholesterol, are essential for starting the process of atherosclerosis. The lower your LDL-cholesterol, the less atherosclerosis you develop. There are no two ways about it.

There are even some people who say that low cholesterol is bad for us, because we need cholesterol for nerve tissue and the production of some hormones. Although it’s true that we do need some cholesterol, the cells that make hormones can make enough to use themselves – they don’t need to scavenge it from the blood. In people needing treatment to lower their cholesterol, there is no level of LDL-cholesterol below which we see harm that outweighs their increasing benefit.