Affordable Drug Combo Significantly Cuts Heart Attack and Stroke Risks

High-risk patients extensively diminished their risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke by taking a three-drug combination of common heart medications. The drug combo included a generic statin, a generic blood pressure medication, and a low-dose aspirin.

According to a group of U.S. researchers, the results of their recent study have revealed a simple, effective and inexpensive way of helping high-risk patients with diabetes or heart disease to avoid heart attacks and strokes. The study was published online in the American Journal of Managed Care.

Lead author R. James Dudl, M.D., the diabetes clinical head at Kaiser Permanente’s Care Management Institute, said, “This is a proven program that can be applied in many settings to reduce heart attacks and strokes, and at the same time decrease the cost of care for those events.” He also noted that heart disease is the number one killer in the United States, and that 23 million Americans have diabetes.

To evaluate the impact of the drug combo on high-risk patients, the researchers followed 68,560 patients aged 55 and older who suffered from cardiac issues or diabetes. The study participants received a daily combination of 40 milligrams of a common cholesterol-lowering drug known as lovastatin, and 20 milligrams of the blood pressure-lowering drug lisinopril for a two-year period. In addition, approximately 75 percent of the participants were taking a low- dose aspirin.

During the study, the participants were assigned to one of three groups. The first group took the drug combo half of the time, while the second group took it less than half the time, and the third group either took one of the drugs or none at all. The medication schedules of the study subjects were followed through monitoring of patient prescription refill records. The researchers were unable to measure the use of low-dose aspirin, as it is not a prescription drug.

During the year following treatment, results revealed that patients who took the drug combo for 22 percent of the time, decreased their risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke by more than 60 percent, while those patients who took the drug combo for half of the time cut their risk by 80 percent. According to the researchers, in the first year alone, the combination treatment prevented 1,271 heart attacks and strokes. Dudl acknowledged, “What was fairly amazing to me was that we got such a good drop in heart attack and strokes despite the low adherence. The issue now is how to increase adherence.”

Study co-author Jim Bellows, Ph.D., Kaiser Permanente Care Management Institute’s director of the Center for Evaluation and Innovation, stated, “We have long known from clinical trials that aspirin, cholesterol-lowering therapies such as statins, and ACE inhibitors such as lisinopril reduce the risk of future heart attacks and strokes in patients who have had a prior cardiovascular event or who have diabetes. Our primary goal here was to increase the use of the drugs.”

In addition to having impressive results, the combination drug treatment caused no apparent side effects. And, because the drugs contained in the medication combo are readily available, as well as inexpensive, the drug therapy appears even more promising for the future treatment of high-risk patients.

According to the American Heart Association, adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to have heart disease or suffer a stroke than people who do not have diabetes. Prior studies have shown that controlling blood sugar does little as a preventive measure for these ailments.