BRITAIN: A once-a-day pill for everyone over 55 could undo some of the ill-effects of the sedentary, high-cholesterol Western lifestyle and slash the rate of strokes and heart attacks by more than 80 per cent, doctors said yesterday.
The bold concept of the Polypill, a combination of six different drugs, was launched in the British Medical Journal by its inventors with the claim that it could have "a greater impact on the prevention of disease in the Western world than any other known intervention".
The editor of the BMJ, Richard Smith, wrote: "It's perhaps more than 50 years since we published something as important as the cluster of papers from Nick Wald, Malcolm Law and others."
While Prof Wald, from the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, part of the University of London, accepts that some people will choose not to medicalise their life as soon as they hit late middle age, he maintains that the huge advantages of taking the Polypill outweigh the risks of side-effects in healthy 55-year-olds.
He said: "This is like vaccination in a community that has the disease all over the place." At least a third of adults already took daily pills in the shape of vitamin supplements which had uncertain benefits.
The Polypill, the authors of the papers estimate, would give about a third of the over-55s an average extra 11 years of life free from a heart attack or stroke.
The same effect could be obtained from eating a diet of fruit and vegetables, taking exercise and giving up cigarettes, but Prof Wald is a pragmatist. "Changing the total diet of the nation is really quite impractical," he said.
Dr Smith agreed with him, saying: "These are all good and important things to do, but, as we know from bitter experience, very hard to do."
The Polypill is medicine's answer to man's frailty. It combines aspirin, a cholesterol-lowering drug, three drugs that lower blood pressure at half the standard dose and folic acid.
Individually, these drugs act on one of four cardiovascular risk factors - cholesterol levels, blood pressure, blood homocysteine levels and platelet function.
Prof Wald's researches suggest that they can be combined in a single daily dose without losing any of the protective effect or interacting unpleasantly.
The side-effects of these drugs, the BMJ papers say, are low.