What are common medications used to treat cardiovascular disease?

What are some common medications that you use to treat cardiovascular disease? So probably one of the commonest medications is statins and we had some recent research out of Imperial because you know statins as soon as you mention statins someone will talk about side effects of statins and actually when you treat lots of people who are on statins you realize actually the number that come back to you saying I've had a side effect from statins is actually relatively low. My practice, I don't know what the official numbers are, but my practice is somewhere under 5% of patients will actually come back and say they have side effects from statins. We had a recent study published out of Imperial that showed that if you gave patients a tablet and said it was a statin and it's a placebo, they would complain of the same side effects as if, you know, that they would have done because they knew it was a statin. So they complained of the same muscle cramps and aches, even if given a placebo but told it was a statin or told that it could be a statin rather. So it's clear that some of the effects are just because of the stigma around statins, the stigma that people know statins cause side effects, therefore if I feel something it's probably attributable to the fact that I'm taking statin whereas in reality it may not be. But statins is the most common one. Of course what statins do is that they lower the cholesterol overall flowing in the blood vessels. But not only do they do that, but they improve the endothelial lining. So they help, along with the other aspects, to help improve the endothelial lining. And then if you do have plaque in your heart arteries, it helps stabilize that plaque, making it less likely to fly off and cause heart attack. So statins is, by far and away, probably the most common medicine that you'll come across in cardiovascular disease. And then we think about things like aspirin, which are an antiplatelet agent. Aspirin works by reducing the stickiness of the platelets in the blood vessel. So you can imagine if a heart attack is a clot forms in a vessel, part of the formation of that clot is by platelets all clumping together. So you can imagine if your platelets are less sticky, they're less likely to clump together and less likely to cause you heart attacks. So aspirin is another one. And of course because the platelets are less sticky, if you are to cut yourself you're more likely to bleed because you don't have the platelets all clumping together to form a clot to stop you bleeding. So that's one of the side effects or risks of having an aspirin or clopidogrel which is another type of antiplatelet agent. So statins are one of them. Aspirin is another main one. And then things like ACE inhibitors and beta blockers. And again beta blockers can be used to relieve angina because they reduce the workload on the heart. So they can be used to reduce angina. They can be used in hypertension. More commonly, you'd use drugs like ACE inhibitors, like Ramipril, that can be used for patients with hypertension, or more commonly used, patients with hypertension or heart failure. And again, they work on the neurohormonal system to help lower the blood pressure overall and help in heart failure, again, partly by reducing blood pressure and reducing workload, but partly also by excreting things that help in terms of treating heart failure.