Older patients with heart disease who took a “polypill” combination of three different drugs had a lower risk of relevant cardiovascular events, according to a new study published Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented in Congress of the European Society of Cardiology, Spain.
The study authors, led by researcher Valentin Fuster, director of Mount Sinai Heart in New York and director general of the Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research, analyzed 2,499 patients in seven European countries who had a history of type 1 myocardial infarction in the last six years. months and were over 75 years of age or at least 65 years of age with at least one risk factor, such as diabetes or mild or moderate renal dysfunction.
Half of the patients received the polypill that contained aspirin, ramipril and atorvastatin, while others received the usual standard of care. Patients were followed for a median of three years.
The researchers identified 48 cardiovascular deaths in the polypill group and 71 in the usual care group, meaning that patients who took the drug had a 33% relative risk reduction for cardiovascular death. The polypill was also favorable on other measures studied in the study, such as stroke or myocardial infarction.
The polypill and the trial are the fruit of 15 years of work, Fuster said. He and his colleagues say that one of the main problems in medicine is the lack of adherence to medications, especially in the cardiovascular field and more specifically in heart attack patients.
The American Heart Association lists prescription drugs as one of the first things people can do to prevent a second heart attack.
“It looks like we have a tremendous kind of tool, which is a simple pill, that is actually significantly better,” Fuster said. “Probably most of the reason is because of better adherence, because it’s a simple drug with excellent results and the impact is as good or even better than aspirin in the past.”
He said it was notable that the two curves — those that took a polypill and those that received standard care — split early on and continued to separate over the years, meaning there is a sense that if the study extended, there would be “even more impressive” results.
Fuster said the polypill is something that could have a “very significant” impact on the general population.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), someone has a heart attack every 40 seconds in the country. There are about 805,000 heart attacks in the US every year – 200,000 of them happening to people who have already had one.
There are some limitations to the research, including that the study was not conducted “blindly” and all patients were enrolled before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Source: CNN Brasil
