Giving people an inexpensive pill containing generic drugs that prevent heart attacks — an idea first proposed 20 years ago but rarely tested — worked quite well in studies, slashing the rate of heart attacks by more than half among those who regularly took the pills.

If other studies now underway find similar results, such multidrug cocktails — sometimes called “polypills” — given to vast numbers of older people could radically change the way cardiologists fight the soaring rates of heart disease and strokes.

Even if the concept is ultimately adopted, there will be battles over the ingredients. The pill in the study, which involved the participation of 6,800 people, contained a cholesterol-lowering statin, two blood-pressure drugs and a low-dose aspirin.

But the study, published by The Lancet, was designed 14 years ago. More recent research questioned the wisdom of giving some drugs to older people with no history of disease.

The stakes are high. A polypill offers a way to help millions lead longer, healthier lives.

About 18 million people a year die of cardiovascular disease, and 80 percent of them are in poor and middle-income countries threatened by rising rates of obesity, diabetes, tobacco use and sedentary living.

Medical experts, however, are sharply divided over the polypill concept.

Its advocates — including some prominent cardiologists — point to the study as evidence that the World Health Organization should endorse distributing such pills without a prescription to hundreds of millions of people over age 50 around the globe. Some have estimated that widespread use could cut cardiac death rates by 60 to 80 percent.

“The polypill concept is very important and it’s surprising that it’s taking so long for people to accept it,” said Dr. Salim Yusuf, director of the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University in Canada and an expert on cardiac health in poor countries, who was not involved in the study. “This study takes us one step closer.”

Other leading cardiologists consider the approach unethical and dangerous. Because aspirin, statins and blood-pressure drugs all have side effects, they argue, no one should get them without first being assessed for risk factors like high blood pressure, high cholesterol or family history.

“I’m a skeptic of the one-size-fits-all, four-drugs-for-everyone approach,” said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, head of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. “It runs counter to what most of us in the U.S. consider good medical practice.”

Simple tests, including cholesterol tests that use only a finger prick, are available, he noted.

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now the president of Resolve to Save Lives, an organization that seeks to lower worldwide cardiac deaths, said he thought a four-drug pill like the one used in the study was appropriate only for people who had suffered a cardiac event.

Some blood pressure medications are safe enough to give to untested people, he said. But aspirin, which can cause bleeding in the brain, is not; and statins, which can, in rare cases, cause liver and muscle damage, may not be.

This was the first study of a multidrug pill that was large and long-lasting enough to measure “clinical outcomes” — how many people actually had heart attacks, strokes or episodes of heart failure while taking the pills, rather than just how many, for example, lowered their blood pressure or cholesterol.

Similar studies are underway in many countries.

However, since there is so much controversy about the ingredients used in the medication, each study has its own pill recipe.

Dr. Rekha Mankad, director of the Women’s Heart Clinic at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, who was not involved in the Iran study, said it had some flaws, including early problems with how clusters were chosen and the fact that each cluster inevitably included some people already on heart-disease medication.

Nonetheless, she said, the overall study was well-designed and she particularly praised the fact that half the participants were women.

“And,” she added, “the adherence rate was fantastic.”

More than 80 percent of the study participants took most of their pills.

“This is one pill with all the major things patients need,” she added. “Now we need to see how difficult it will be to apply it to the real world.”

 

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