Stroke kills around 5.5 million people every year, worldwide. Two-thirds of these deaths take place in developing countries like India. An estimate of cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths in India suggests that 52 per cent of CVD deaths occur among people below 70 years as compared to 23 per cent in other countries. Deaths from coronary heart diseases in India rose from 1.17 million in 1990 to 1.59 million in 2000. It is expected to rise to 2.03 million by 2010. The prevalence of risk factors for coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke in India is overwhelming. It is estimated that 20-40 per cent urban Indians are hypertensive, 38 per cent are dyslipedemics (those with unhealthy amount of lipids in their blood) and 56 per cent of Indian men (12-60 years) are tobacco users. These numbers, combined with the rapid rate of urbanisation and unhealthy dietary habits, make them ticking bombs. If the numbers have been rising constantly, the efforts to address the problem have also been equally sustained. Living up to the old saying that prevention is better than cure, researchers have been busy trying to find the perfect drug for preventing cardiovascular disease. "For long, researchers have been toying with the idea of combining several pertinent drugs to make a single pill that will take care of problems like hypertension, high cholesterol and other such risk factors that can give rise to cardiovascular diseases," explains a senior scientist at Cadila Pharmaceuticals in Ahmedabad. Says Dr Joy Thomas, cardiologist at Frontier Lifeline and K.M. Cherian Heart Foundation in Chennai: "Polypill was proposed to be a packaged solution for cardiovascular diseases and stroke. Its constituent drugs