The idea of combining antihypertensive drugs, a statin, and sometimes aspirin into a polypill to prevent heart attacks and strokes is now a dozen years old, but still no drug is licensed in a high income country. This week researchers, funders, regulators, policymakers, and drug manufacturers gathered together in Hamilton, Canada, to review and perhaps […]
A Spanish friend who is a pharmacist and basic scientist and with whom I have a spirited argument over the polypill has emailed me to gloat over the press reports derived from a Cochrane review that statins provide no benefit for healthy people. She believes that healthy living will suffice for fending off heart attacks […]
One of the things about being an “old guy” is that you realise how extraordinarily slow we are at doing the right thing. You also see wheels being constantly reinvented. This morning, for example, I heard on the radio how the Health Select Committee had “discovered” that 10% of people suffer harm on being admitted […]
One of the things I love about the polypill is that it upsets everybody. (Just in case there are still people who haven’t heard of the polypill, it’s one pill that contains a statin, several drugs to lower blood pressure, and possibly aspirin that if everybody over 55 started taking daily might prevent three quarters […]
I spent two days last week in the seductive grandeur of Trinity College, Oxford, fretting about the global pandemic of chronic disease, but I left feeling optimistic—despite the pandemic raging as fiercely as ever. […]