At the European Society for Cardiology Congress this week, we learned about more situations where aspirin is unhelpful. Professor Gerry Fowkes and colleagues from Edinburgh looked at nearly 30000 men and women aged 50 to 80 years who had never had any cardiovascular disease, but had a low ankle-brachial pressure index, a marker of peripheral vascular disease. The ankle brachial index (ABI) is the ratio of the blood pressure in the arm to the blood pressure at the ankle, and is an indicator of subclinical atherosclerosis. The ABI predicts risk of major vascular events in healthy populations, independently of established cardiovascular risk factors, such as diabetes, smoking and cholesterol. The Edinburgh team recruited over 3000 people with low ABI from their population and randomised them to 100mg aspirin or placebo, with 8 years of follow-up.

There was no difference between aspirin and placebo whether we look at cardiovascular events or all cause mortality, and there were more major bleeds in the aspirin arm of the trial. Same bottom line as before: do not give aspirin to people before they have a vascular event.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) causes more mortality and morbidity than any other disease in both rich countries and poor countries [1]. The risk factors have been well-known for 50 years, but the optimal prevention strategy is still elusive.

Primary prevention treats individuals before they have a heart attack, whereas secondary prevention focuses on individuals who have had a heart attack. Several classes of drugs treat cardiovascular risk factors, demonstrating benefits in both primary and secondary prevention [2]. Many of these drugs are off-patent, and therefore cheap. Six years ago, Wald and Law hypothesised that a “Polypill”, containing three anti-hypertensives, folic acid, simvastatin and aspirin, could reduce the rates of CVD by over 80%, if all adults over the age of 55 years took it [3]. This week the Lancet published the first ever trial of such a Polypill [4, 5].