Many people would resist calls for them to take a daily pill simply to extend their life, researchers say today.
Most would accept the medication – but a significant minority would reject, US researchers found.
The online survey was carried out by Dr Robert Hutchins and his team at the University of California San Francisco, USA. They asked 1,000 people, with an average age of 50, whether they would forfeit time at the end of their life, if it meant not taking a daily pill.
This showed that 8% of respondents would swap two years of life to avoid taking daily cardiovascular disease medication. A further 21% would swap one week to a year at the end of their lives. However, 70% would not swap any time, and would take the daily pill.
Results appear in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. They also reveal that 38% would accept a small risk of death to avoid taking a daily pill, and 21% would pay 1,000 US dollars or more to avoid taking a daily pill for the rest of their lives.
Dr Hutchins says: "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. 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.
"When you consider that many adults are on numerous pills, the effect is often magnified for that person. 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."
Hutchins, R. et al. One in three people would risk shorter life rather than take daily pill to avoid heart disease. Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes 4 February 2015 doi: 10.1161/CIRCOUTCOMES.114.001240
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