Thanks for sharing your experience. While there are some doctors who say there are no good or bad cholesterol and cholesterol is so much essential for our body that the brain is almost made of it and the body makes its own cholesterol. The problem with cholesterol lowering or anti diabetics is that it makes one more dependent on it increasing the dose as days progresses. Thus the side effects are not immediately realised but long term like dementia.

These type of diseases like cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes etc are all for majority to majority of people are due to life style. Less sleep, junk food, lack of exercise and stress are dominant factors in these life style diseases and many people just got normalised when their life style was positively changed.

Even for your example between your mother or sister the differentiating factors should be something to with the malice of modern era lifestyle. Although you made a good decision by reducing the dose , a better decision would be permanent lifestyle change after finding out the root cause. This is mainly due to the danger of dose dependence as the days progress to require more and more dose. The side effects like that of diabetes or dementia are inevitable.

Just my two cents!