According to a recent meta-analysis of clinical trials published in risk may be reduced. natural medicine.

Hardening and narrowing of arteries due to cholesterol and fat buildup can cut off blood flow to vital organs and plays a key role in causing heart attacks, strokes, and other heart diseases worldwide. The Office for National Statistics has announced that it is the leading cause of death. Health Research Institute.

Treating this plaque buildup often requires multiple drugs targeting lipid levels and blood pressure, making combinations of drugs into “polypills” an attractive option. says Nilay Shah, 2014 MD, 2014 MPH, 2020 GME assistant professor. Co-authors of this study are Preventive Medicine in the Division of Medicine and Epidemiology in the Division of Cardiology.

“Regimens for both primary and secondary prevention of heart disease, meaning prevention in people who don’t already have heart disease and prevention of further heart disease in people who have had heart disease, are a bit more complicated. It’s often difficult for patients to take multiple different types of drugs or multiple different medications. This is where the idea of ​​fixed-dose combinations or polypills was born.”

In the study, Shah and his colleagues analyzed the results of 26 previous randomized clinical trials involving polypills containing at least one blood pressure-lowering drug and one lipid-lowering drug. did.

According to the study, researchers reviewed data from more than 27,000 study participants and found that polypill therapy lowered LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, lowered blood pressure, and increased medication compliance. He said he discovered something.

However, participants who took the polypill also experienced more side effects, the study found.

Overall, polypill therapy reduced the risk of all-cause mortality by 11 percent, according to the study results.

“Not only did participants’ heart health measures such as blood pressure and cholesterol improve, but they also had higher rates of adherence to recommended medication courses, and PolyPill administration also showed a reduced risk of death and heart disease events. Confirmed,” Shah said.

Because some polypill therapies are already commercially available and FDA-approved, the findings could help clinicians create medication regimens that are easier for patients to stick to, Shah said. Ta.

Going forward, Shah said he and his collaborators will work to understand how polypill therapy can best be implemented in diverse clinical settings.

“Now that we know that fixed-dose combination therapy is effective in reducing heart disease risk, how can we bring it to the people who would benefit from it?” Shah said. . “How do we make sure that people get them from manufacturers in a fair way so that they can get affordable insurance coverage? We need to move away from individual drug therapies and allow clinicians to provide fixed-dose How can we use the combination and be able to prescribe it to patients?”