After a fifteen day test, I’ve concluded that 20mg of simvastatin daily has a major effect on my results on Seth Robert’s Brain Reaction Time (BRT) test.

Notice the big changes on the days before and after taking the statin (the “treatment”). The two weeks before were “clean” – no fish oil, no other special vitamins, foods, travel, or other changes in daily habits – making the change even more obvious and sudden: just one day makes the difference. (The chart shows BRT measurements roughly 24 hours after treatment).

With n=34, here’s a simple T-Test to show the effect:

##
##  Welch Two Sample t-test
##
## data:  data[[wrt]][treatment > 0] and data[[wrt]][treatment == 0]
## t = 7.2489, df = 25.529, p-value = 1.191e-07
## alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##  15.81103 28.34282
## sample estimates:
## mean of x mean of y
##  71.00000  48.92308

My fellow Seattle Quantified-Selfer Mark Drangsholt, who studied something similar on himself, says 2-3 weeks of treatment helped him reduce or eliminate brain fog and it appears to help me too. This is consistent with other research that shows that statins seem to benefit the brain.

Incidentally, the statin had no significant effect on my sleep (as measured with Zeo):

Sleep (n=34) Average (hrs) Standard Deviation w/Statin (n=15)
total sleep (Z) 6.408 0.618 6.424 (SD=0.58)
REM 1.765 0.45 1.814 (SD=0.44)
Deep 1.031 0.201 1.006 (SD=0.13)

I’ve already demonstrated that two or three Kirkland fish oil pills taken daily give me a statistically-significant higher score, while other obvious candidates like sleep or alcohol make no difference. Seth’s app clearly is measuring something. In my next experiments, I’ll try to pin down more precisely what that is as I refine the app to make it easier and faster to use.