1 in 3 prefers shorter life to daily heart pill, reveals study

Survey finds that more than 8% of participants were willing to trade as much as two years of life to avoid taking daily medication for cardiovascular disease

One in three adults say they would risk living a shorter life instead of taking a daily pill to prevent cardiovascular disease, a new study has found.

Researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill surveyed 1,000 people (average age 50) via the Internet.

The participants answered a hypothetical question: how much time they were willing to forfeit at the end of their lives to avoid taking daily medication to prevent cardiovascular disease.

They were also asked the amount of money they would pay and the hypothetical risk of death they were willing to accept to avoid taking medications.

The survey found that more than 8 per cent of participants were willing to trade as much as two years of life to avoid taking daily medication for cardiovascular disease; while roughly 21 per cent would trade between one week and a year of their lives.

About 70 per cent said they wouldn't trade any weeks of their lives to avoid taking a CVD pill daily.

About 13 per cent of participants said they would accept minimal risk of death to avoid taking a pill daily; 9 per cent said they'd risk a 10 per cent chance; and about 62 per cent were not willing to gamble any risk of immediate death.

About 21 per cent said they would pay USD 1,000 or more to avoid taking a pill each day for the rest of their lives, but 43 per cent said they wouldn't pay any amount.

"What we were really trying to measure is how much the act of taking a pill - obtaining it, remembering to take it and actually taking it - interferes with one's quality of life," said Robert Hutchins, lead author and resident physician in UCSF's Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine.

"Even ignoring the side-effects of pills, the act of having to take a daily pill can have a large effect on an individual's quality of life," he said.

"When you consider that many adults are on numerous pills, the effect is often magnified for that person," Hutchins said.

"On a population level, even for the small reductions in quality of life like those found in this study, that effect multiplied across millions of people can have very large effects on the cost-effectiveness of that drug for a population," he said.

While Hutchins and co-authors believe this is the largest study to date to quantify the utility of taking such medications, they noted that the survey was hypothetical.

Also, although the survey stipulated that participants would not have to pay for pills and to ignore any potential side effects, researchers are not certain that these issues did not affect responses.

The research was published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, an American Heart Association journal.