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| English: taking blood pressure in PE (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
ORLANDO (Florida) — Healthy people could cut their risk of heart disease in half with a new “super pill” that combines low doses of aspirin and drugs that lower blood pressure and cholesterol, a study said yesterday.
“We believe that the polypill probably has the potential to reduce heart disease by 60 per cent and stroke by 50 per cent,” lead investigator Salim Yusuf told reporters at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting, where the study was presented.
“The thought that people might be able to take a single pill to reduce multiple cardiovascular risk factors has generated a lot of excitement. It could revolutionise heart disease prevention as we know it,” Mr Yusuf said.
In the three-month study cardiologists compared the impact on blood pressure, cholesterol and heart rate of the combination “polypill” and the medications that make it up, taken individually or together. The study involved 2,053 patients, recruited from heart centres around India between March 2007 and August last year.
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Juice for the heart, anyone?
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The “polypill” contains low doses of three medications against high blood pressure, simvastatin, which lowers LDL (or bad cholesterol) and aspirin, a known bloodthinner.
Participants in the study were divided into groups and given either the “polypill” or aspirin, the cholesterol-lowering medication, or one of the three blood pressure medications on their own; different combinations of blood pressure medications, or all three blood pressure treatments with or without aspirin.
The researchers found that blood pressure in participants in the “polypill” group was lowered as much as in the group taking the three blood pressure medications together, with or without aspirin.
Those blood pressure reductions “could theoretically lead to about a 24 per cent risk reduction in congestive heart disease and 33 per cent risk reduction in strokes in those with average blood pressure levels,” the study said.
The “polypill” reduced LDL cholesterol significantly more than in all other groups except the one in which simvastatin was taken alone. The simvastatin group’s LDL levels fell only slightly more than the “polypill” group, the study found.
Heart rates in the “polypill” group and the group taking one of the blood-pressure medications, atenolol, fell by seven beats a minute — significantly more than in the other study groups.
Side-effects in patients taking the “polypill” were the same as when taking one or two medications, the study found.
“The side-effects of one drug may be counteracted by beneficial effects of another. So the rate of stopping medications was the same,” it said.
The study was “a critical first step to inform the design of larger, more definitive studies, as well as further development of appropriate combinations of blood-pressure lowering drugs with statins and aspirin,” said Mr Yusuf. AFP
From TODAY, World
Tuesday, 31-March-2009
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