NBC News – For decades, a daily dose of aspirin has been widely considered a way to protect healthy people from cardiovascular disease and even cancer. But a large, new, international study finds that, even at low doses, long-term use of aspirin may be harmful — without providing benefit — for older people who have not already had a heart attack or stroke.
The new research reinforces the results from a study published in late August, which found that daily low-dose aspirin was too risky to be prescribed to patients at moderate risk of heart disease. In the August study and the new one, researchers found a significant risk of internal gastric bleeding caused by the medication, which thins the blood. Older patients experienced no health benefits from taking aspirin, according to the new report, published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine,
“We knew there would an increased risk of bleeding with aspirin, because there has always been,” said study coauthor Dr. Anne Murray, a geriatrician and epidemiologist at the Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. “But not only did it not decrease risk of disability or death, it did not decrease the risk of heart attack and stroke, and there was an increase in the rate of death.”
The current guidelines recommend a daily aspirin for adults in their 50s who are at high risk of cardiovascular disease, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol or a history of smoking. The new study was designed to find out whether low-dose aspirin could prolong healthy, independent living in seniors who had not shown signs of heart disease.
“For healthy people, 70 and older, who don’t have a reason to be on aspirin, such as a previous heart attack or stroke, there was no discernible benefit,” Murray told NBC News.
The trial followed 19,114 seniors — 2,411 from the U.S. and 16,703 Australians — for an average of 4.7 years. The minimum age for Caucasian participants was 70 and 65 for African-American and Hispanic volunteers, due to their higher risk of dementia and cardiovascular disease.
At the end of the trial, 90.3 percent of the aspirin-treated patients were still alive, compared to 90.5 percent of those who received placebos. Rates of physical disability and dementia were similar between the groups. The rates of coronary heart disease, heart attacks and strokes were also similar.
The big difference between the groups was in the rate of internal bleeding. Hemorrhagic stroke, bleeding in the brain, gastrointestinal bleeding and bleeding in other sites that required transfusion or hospitalization occurred in 361, or 3.8 percent, of participant in the aspirin-treated group and 265, or 2.7 percent, of those in the placebo group.
