NZ researchers ready to launch world's first 'polypill' trial

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

New Zealand patients may be the first in the world to take a new "polypill" designed to prevent heart attacks and strokes.

If the Government's Health Research Council agrees to pay for the $2 million Auckland University trial of the pill, containing four proven drugs, work will start on it next June.

"Then we would start recruiting patients towards the end of the year," the co-director of the university's clinical trials research unit, Dr Anthony Rodgers, said yesterday.

Researchers are arranging to obtain supplies of the pill and are talking to Primary Health Organisations in Auckland and Hamilton about recruiting 1500 of their patients for the trial.

It would be the world's first trial of the polypill, Dr Rodgers said. He is working with British researchers who are also trying to set up a trial.

He was involved in research published in the British Medical Journal in June that showed combining a range of beneficial drugs into one pill would increase their consumption and reduce rates of heart disease in Western countries by more than 80 per cent.

Another study he took part in, published this month in the Lancet, found that older, cheaper drugs for reducing blood pressure, such as diuretics and beta blockers, were just as effective and safe as newer, more expensive ones, including calcium channel blockers and ACE-inhibitors.

Cardiovascular disease is New Zealand's leading killer, accounting for nearly 40 per cent of deaths. Heart disease kills more than 7800 people a year and strokes more than 2800.

Patients on the polypill trial would have heart disease or diabetes or have had a stroke. They would receive either a range of standard medicines to help treat their conditions or the polypill.

Made in India, the polypill would contain aspirin, a cholesterol-lowering statin, a diuretic and a beta blocker.

The trial will test whether polypill patients are more likely to keep taking their medicine than those on multiple drugs. Some patients taking many drugs find it hard to comply.

"People much prefer having one pill rather than five," Dr Rodgers said. "Often what happens is that people end up not even being prescribed the third or fourth or fifth thing they should be on."

The separate research in the Lancet showed that doctors could confidently put patients with newly diagnosed high blood pressure on to the older drugs for a fraction of the cost of the newer ones.

Commercial pressure had led to exaggeration of the side-effect risks of the older drugs, when in fact they were about the same as the newer ones.