Heart attacks halved by daily dose of "cheap pill"

Paris. Researchers said Friday that an inexpensive pill, once a day, combining aspirin with blood pressure and cholesterol-lowering drugs, reduced by a third cardiovascular disease as a whole and more than half of heart attacks, researchers said.

In clinical trials, "polypill" was particularly effective in people with no history of cardiovascular disease, reducing the number of serious events by 40%, the researcher said in the medical journal The Lancet.

For people with a history of heart problems and stroke, the combination of medications was only half as effective as the control group, which had received advice on healthy lifestyles but not of drugs.

Among participants who took the pill as indicated – at least 70% of the time – the incidence of heart attack incidence decreased by 57%.

The concept of polypill was first proposed more than 20 years ago as a simpler and more cost-effective approach to the treatment of cardiovascular disease, which often requires multiple medications.

Currently, patients are usually prescribed one or more medications to lower blood pressure, as well as a statin, which controls lipids such as fatty acids. Aspirin, an badgesic, has anticoagulant properties.

"The more tablets have to be taken, the less they respect the long-term rules," said Kausik Ray, a professor of public health and Imperial College London not involved in the study.

"For chronic diseases, it's a challenge because you ask people to take multiple medications every day for 30 or 40 years."

According to previous research, about a third of patients stop taking their medication 90 days after a heart attack.

But despite its obvious potential, the polypill had not yet been tested on a large number of people over a long period.

Scientists led by Reza Malekzadeh of the Tehran University of Medical Sciences recruited nearly 7,000 men and women, aged 50 to 75, living in rural Golestan, Iran.

About one in ten had had a heart attack, stroke, or other cardiovascular episode.

The participants were divided into two groups of about the same size. One received a "lifestyle advice", while the other also received a daily polypill from 2011 to 2013.

The doctors monitored the observance of drug treatment and then calculated the number of stroke and heart attacks in each cohort over the next five years. Crucially, compliance was significantly higher with the all-in-one pill. "Drugs do not work if they are not taken," noted Amitava Banerjee. (AFP)