Could Taking A Single Pill Make A Big Difference In Heart Disease?
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - Could taking a single pill make a big difference in heart disease?
That's what Vanderbilt researchers have been studying in a year-long trial in a low income community health center in Alabama.
Researchers call it a polypill. That's because it's actually a combination of four drugs: Three for blood pressure and one for cholesterol.
Doctors have been studying different polypill combinations for some time, mostly in low and middle income countries. This is one of the first to be studied in the U.S.
Retired police officer Henryk Pycz takes a lot of pills to manage his diabetes and high blood pressure.
"When I was taking the medication consisting of a variety of tablets, I'd have either five, six or seven tablets to take," he said.
It's a common complaint among heart patients with multiple risk factors like high blood pressure and high cholesterol. It often takes several drugs to control those risk factors. So what happens?
"People aren't taking the pills they're supposed to. Patients with high cholesterol are supposed to take a statin but only 50% are actually doing it," said Dr. Valentin Fuster, physician-in-chief and chairman of cardiology of the Mount Sinai Health System.
He's also led several international studies on polypills. He's found that combining several drugs into a single pill results in a major reduction in cardiovascular risk factors.
"People will take the polypill but they won't take many pills together," he said.
In the new study in the New England Journal of Medicine, Vanderbilt researchers found that low income residents in an Alabama community who took a blood pressure, cholesterol polypill lowered the risk factors enough to translate into a 25% reduction in the possibility of having a cardiovascular event like stroke or heart attack.
The findings are similar to what Dr. Fuster has seen internationally.
"This is a real clue that a polypill, at least in theory, could have many advantages," he said.
In other words, it's all about patient compliance with taking their prescribed medications, and one pill is more likely than three, four or five to be adhered to.
The one weakness in the present study is that it extrapolated from makers like high blood pressure and cholesterol to predict heart disease lowering.
The gold standard is to look at outcomes - actual heart attacks and strokes. Those studies take much longer and are much more expensive.
