One heart-attack pill cut deaths by a third

Many stop taking one or more within the first year, a known driver of second heart attacks and strokes. Researchers in Spain combined aspirin, a statin, and a blood pressure drug into one tablet and tested it against standard separate-pill care.

The SECURE trial followed 2,499 patients who had survived a recent heart attack for about three years. Those given the combined pill were 33 percent less likely to die of cardiovascular causes than those managing three prescriptions on their own, largely because they kept taking it.

The idea of a cardiovascular polypill had been proposed two decades earlier, but it took that long to gather trial evidence at this scale. Adherence, not the drugs themselves, seemed to be the main advantage: more polypill patients were still on treatment a year later than patients juggling separate bottles. Larger and longer trials are still needed to confirm how much of the benefit comes from the formulation itself.

One pill, a third fewer deaths.