Study reveals poor affordability of common drugs for heart diseases

October, 2015

According to the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study published in the October 21 issue of The Lancet, almost 60% of Indian households cannot afford the four common medicines that can prevent heart attacks most of the time putting them at risk. The World Health Organisation has proposed that four common medicines to prevent recurrent cardiovascular disease — aspirin, beta-blockers, angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, and statins — should be used by 50% of patients by the year 2025. But a survey conducted across 18 countries, which collected data from pharmacies in 596 communities, shows while these medicines were available in many places, they were unaffordable to a majority of the population, particularly in the low and middle income nations, including India. The medicines were potentially unaffordable for less than one percent households in high-income countries compared to 59% of households in India. In low income countries, they are out of reach for 60% households. 

Indian results are based on a survey in 90 communities involving 16,874 households, where 686 patients with cardiovascular disease were reported. Almost 19 per cent of these patients use at least one medicine, while another 11 per cent uses either two or three of these medicines. India and other low-income countries showed that they did not differ much in the use of aspirin; but, beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, and statins were used more often in India. “Unless governments in low and middle-income countries begin initiatives to make these essential heart medicines available and provided free — as is done for HIV — then their use is always going to be far less than optimal,” said principal investigator Salim Yusuf, director of the Population Health Research Institute, Hamilton Health Sciences and McMaster University, Canada, and president of the World Heart Federation, Geneva.