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What is aspirin doing in there? The best current research indicates even older adults shouldn't be taking a daily aspirin unless they have had a heart attack. O

• PaulHoule 4y ago
  Personally I am skeptical about the polypill. To this day there is a huge amount of controversy about how to treat hypertension and what the first line treatment should be, everybody except for the polypill people seem to agree today that beta blockers are not a good first line treatment for hypertension because of side effects (reduced capacity for exercise for one thing) and because the actual life prolonging effects aren't proportional to the blood pressure lowering effects. Of course you could make a polypill with different ingredients but whatever ingredients you choose there are going to be some concerns about side effects and whether these are truly effective. You've got the advantage that one simple pill is easy to prescribe and easy to take, but the disadvantage that everybody responds to drugs differently. For some drugs I can take a very small dose and get a large effect, there are other drugs that don't do a thing for me. People into supplements and herbal medicine like to combine large numbers of possibly effective substances but the paradigm of conventional pharmacology is to prefer prescribing individual medicines first, the concept of mixing two drugs to change the pharmacokinetics is fashionable today but I think fairly new, see for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirmatrelvir/ritonavir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirmatrelvir/ritonavir