The Success of the Polypill
Not all medical breakthroughs are necessarily expensive. In August, a three-in-one combination pill for heart disease, also known as the polypill, passed its largest test yet. In a large multinational trial of heart attack survivors, the polypill—containing aspirin, a common statin known as atorvastatin, and the ACE inhibitor ramipril—was shown to prevent more heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular events than standard care. As hoped, patients were also more able to keep regularly taking the bundled medication than those taking the treatments individually.
The findings are expected to pave the way for the polypill, developed by the company company Ferrer and approved in the EU and some other countries as Trinomia, to become more widely approved. And since the treatment is made of already cheap drugs, it should remain a cost-effective option for helping heart attack survivors stay healthy.
