A Large Polypill Clinical Trial Shows a Third Reduction in Cardiovascular Events

The research and medical communities are slow to undertake work on combination therapies. Regulation makes it exceedingly expensive to assess multiple combinations, and there are numerous other perverse incentives to challenge any effort to build combination therapies with components developed and manufactured by different groups. Short of working around the existing system of regulation, and methods of doing this at scale are lacking at the present time, this is a challenging problem to solve. People follow incentives. Given this, it it is entirely plausible that there are many largely unexplored instances in which existing classes of medication for age-related disease might synergize to be more effective together. In this context, clinicians and researchers have been discussing polypills for quite some time. The term polypill usually means a combination of existing treatments for cardiovascular disease such as statins to reduce blood cholesterol, ACE inhibitors to lower blood pressure, diuretics to reduce fluid retention, and so forth. The data to date strongly suggests that many reasonable polypill combinations will improve upon single medication use, and possibly do so at lower overall doses, and thus with lower side-effects. Here, researchers report on a recent large clinical trial of a polypill, carried out in a comparatively poor population who are largely without access to the panoply of medications available in wealthier regions. The effect size is abou...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs