Three drugs are better than one for heart disease

Reported by Susan Aldridge, PhD, medical journalist

Taking a combination of three specific drugs offers a better chance of survival for people with heart disease.
Aspirin, cholesterol-lowering statins and beta-blockers to control blood pressure are all known to help those with heart disease. Now a new study, from a team at the University of Nottingham, reveals how a combination of the three is more effective than taking the single drugs.

The work involved over 13,000 patients with heart disease and compared those who had died with those who had not. This showed that taking statins, beta-blockers and aspirin together lowered the death rate by 83 per cent. Adding an angiotensin-converting enzyme blocker to control blood pressure offered no further benefit however.

The findings suggest that doctors should think about prescribing all three drugs, not just one or two of them when a patient is diagnosed with heart disease. In this study, beta-blockers alone led to only a 20 per cent reduction in death rate.

Source
British Medical Journal 7th May 2005 Volume 330 pages 1059-1063