One Pill to Cure All?

June 26 -- — Imagine a single pill that could lower not only cholesterol, but also blood pressure and the risk of heart disease and stroke, all at the same time.

That's what a new study is proposing: a "polypill" that could reduce cardiovascular disease by more than 80 percent. Could this be the "magic bullet" towards a cure?

A Provocative Proposal

The authors of the study, published today in the British Medical Journal, claim that such an intervention would have a "greater impact on prevention of disease in the Western world than any other known intervention." The study was written by researchers at Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of London.

The strategy is to combine many of the most well-known medicines into one cheap and safe pill. The ingredients of such a polypill would contain aspirin, a cholesterol-lowering statin, three blood pressure-lowering agents in half dose, and folic acid.

The drug would be targeted to people with vascular disease and those over the age of 55.

To come up with the components for their polypill, the researchers analyzed data from more than 750 trials with 400,000 participants. The goal was to simultaneously reduce four cardiovascular risk factors and find the best ingredients to achieve that.

Based on their results, the scientists estimated that such a pill would reduce heart disease and risk of stroke by more than 80 percent, while causing withdrawal symptoms in two per 100 people and fatal side effects in less than one in 10,000 users.

The implications for such a drug are enormous. Since many of the polypill's components are common, it could be made from generic drugs, likely making it easy to produce.

Patients who take multiple pills or forget to take all their pills would also probably prefer an all-in-one pill, if it could do the same job with few side effects.

The combination treatment would also have enormous potential for developing countries, where cardiovascular disease is on the rise and multiple drugs can be expensive and more difficult to deliver, medical experts said.