The daily super pill all men over 50 should take to avoid heart attacks

It would contain a cholesterol-busting statin, aspirin and drugs to cut blood pressure.

Professor Roger Boyle, the Department of Health's national director for heart disease and stroke, said it would transform the nation's health and relieve pressure on the NHS.

While mass prescription of a polypill would cost around £6billion a year, heart disease and strokes claim more than 200,000 lives a year and cost the health service £14billion a year to treat.

Women would be medicated slightly later in life, as their hormones protect against heart disease until menopause. Although a polypill is yet to come on the market, one is being tested in New Zealand which would cost no more than £1 a day.

Professor Boyle, who takes statins himself, said: "Although we have seen a decrease in death rates, heart disease remains our country's biggest killer. It kills more than all the cancers put together. The short cut to all this is to say that when you are a man of 50, you need treatment."

He also stressed, however, that lifestyle plays a big part in cardiac health. "One in five of the population only walk for 20 minutes once a year or never at all. That is the most disgusting thing I have ever heard. I don't think they are afraid of exercise - they are just bone idle.

"The couch-potato lifestyle is the biggest driver in the rise of obesity. We need to work on that message. We need to get our obese kids into a healthy lifestyle, having exercise as much more of the daily routine in schools and going to work and in everyone's approach to life." The professor also conceded that the population would have to be persuaded of the benefits of mass medication.

"I don't think the general public is ready yet for a 'get to 50, take a tablet' type of approach," he said.

"I think they want individual assessment and I think we are going to be stuck with that for the time being.

"I think we would be making a big impact with a blanket approach but we are also conscious of being accused of being a nanny state and choice remains important."

The polypill is a GP's dream, as it would cut down on prescriptions and be acceptable to patients who do not wish to take lots of individual tablets each day.

Doctors estimate that mass-medication with such a pill could slash the rate of heart attacks and strokes by 80 per cent. However, critics of mass medication say it turns essentially-healthy people into patients. There are also worries that overreliance on pills would lead them to neglect other aspects of their health, such as exercise and diet.

In addition, Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director of the British Heart Foundation, warned: "The problem is that if you take a polypill and end up with a side effect, you don't know which constituent is behind it. It is an interesting concept but you would need proper clinical trials to see if it has acceptable tolerability and works."

Professor Weissberg is also against giving statins to all over-50s. He said: "I have always taken a cautious view to prescribing. There is no such thing as a totally safe drug."

Introduced in the late Eighties, statins can, in rare cases, cause muscle pain and liver problems, leading some doctors to argue that the risk of the side-effects outweighs the benefits of the drugs for those not showing symptoms of heart disease.

"With statins the downside is about as low as I have seen with any drug, but there is some downside,' added Professor Weissberg.

"You need to accrue quite a lot of information from clinical trials, but also from experience, before you take the sort of approach of putting fluoride in tap water."

Statins, which are thought to save up to 10,000 lives a year, are currently prescribed to survivors of heart attacks and strokes and to those whose cholesterol is much higher than normal.

However, doctors are being urged to prescribe them more widely, with new guidelines recommending they are handed out to all adults judged to have a one in five chance of developing heart disease in the next decade. Doing this would take the number of patients on the drugs to around six million and the annual bill to over £1billion.