Prevention of diseases with drugs - savings or costs?

The paper discusses three approaches to cardiovascular disease prevention from the economic point of view: national programs for risk reduction, antiplatelet therapy and strategies of lipid lowering therapy. The most cost effective approach for cardiovascular risk reduction is a combination of population-wide prevention and the high-risk program with population screening. The high-risk program without population-wide prevention aggravates socio-economic in Acetylsalicylic acid is the antiplatelet drug of choice for cardiovascular disease prevention. Alternative antiplatelet drugs are cost-effective only for secondary prevention; clopidogrel only in case of contraindications for acetylsalicylic acid and dipyridamole in combination with acetylsalicylic acid only in the first two years after a cerebrovascular event. The "treat-to-target" model of lipid lowering treatment is less cost effective than an alternative approach to treating the whole population at risk with fixed doses of statins.