Editing Polypill (section)

=== Preventive use rationale: Treatment of population risk ===
Some preventive-use advocates propose that everyone over a given age (e.g., 55) should take such medications for preventive health, irrespective of individual risk factor levels. The idea is that most people in western countries are at high overall risk, thus lowering risk factor levels will provide broad benefit. This approach emphasizes the perspective that risk factors are continuous, and rigid dichotomies such as "hypertension" and "no hypertension" may be over-simplified and can be viewed instead as continuums of inter-connected factors.<ref>{{cite journal |vauthors=Law MR, Wald NJ |title=Risk factor thresholds: their existence under scrutiny |journal=BMJ |volume=324 |issue=7353 |pages=1570–6 |date=June 2002 |pmid=12089098 |pmc=1123506 |doi=10.1136/bmj.324.7353.1570}}</ref>

In this paradigm, doctors would in effect be treating population risk rather than individual risk factor thresholds as is current mainstream practice. So, if everyone were given a relevant kind of polypill, the average blood pressure and cholesterol levels in the population would fall, thus reducing overall population risk. Perhaps ironically, this is in a sense going in the ''opposite'' direction from [[personalized medicine]], since mass-produced or fixed-dose-combination polypills are in some tension with the goals of personalized medicine, due to the "fixed" nature of the "dose combinations." Proponents of this population-focused approach contend that the advantages of drug consolidation can outweigh any reduction in personalization of drug and/or dose selection. Also, depending on the demographic distribution and market size, there may be room for some different alternative versions of certain general FDCs to be manufactured with differences in their respective dosages and/or drugs. A widely distributed polypill could contain three blood pressure medications at low dose: a [[diuretic]], such as [[hydrochlorothiazide]], a [[beta-blocker]] such as [[atenolol]], and an [[ACE inhibitor]] such as [[lisinopril]]; and these could be combined with a [[statin]] such as [[simvastatin]], [[aspirin]] at a dose of 75&nbsp;mg, and [[folic acid]], which has been shown to reduce the level of homocysteine in the blood, which is another risk factor for heart disease.