Well, @bluesdoc, I couldn't resist commenting on three of your points an hour ago. Everyone's different for sure, but apparently so are statins. FDA records show reported memory loss with a handful of different statins. If CoQ10 works for you, great! I've taken it for several years and still deal with drifting memory.

Borrowing your words, "there's something clearly amiss . . ." I will turn the corner and say that about Cardiology in several respects (which I won't articulate here without getting permission from a number of friends who feel their cardiologist is welded to long-running recipes for diagnosis and treatment by rote). The friends are referring mainly to Cardiology's fluid approaches to hypertension.

I have personal experience with vessels turning to stone, and it was very sad. My aged grandmother got past 70 years with no significant demise in her cognitive or memory facilities, but over a few years in her mid-70s she was overcome with severe dementia to the extent of becoming totally vegetabilized. Her diagnosis was arteriosclerosis. Both of her only sons also died in dementia. I'm hoping my mother's genes will save me from this empty end of my life. Meantime, I arise every morning asking what I might start today that I could pursue for another 20 years! Martin