Millions Of People Take Unnecessary Aspirin To Prevent Heart Disease

Millions of people take unnecessary aspirin to prevent heart disease

The risk of bleeding negates the modest benefit of prophylactic aspirin in healthy people. Scientists remind that there are many other ways to prevent cardiovascular diseases.

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A new, largest to date, review confirmed that people who do not have cardiovascular disease are not shown prophylactic aspirin. Scientific work published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

Aspirin in low doses (up to 325 milligrams per day) has been widely used since the 1980s for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases. Currently, the most important official recommendations (in the USA, Great Britain, Russia) say that aspirin does not help prevent heart attacks, strokes and death from heart disease if taken by healthy people. However, millions of people can continue to take this drug for prophylactic purposes "the old fashioned way," scientists say. A number of organizations still recommend taking aspirin for people who are at high risk of developing heart disease.

The authors of the new review focused on the benefit / risk balance of prophylactic use of aspirin. They analyzed 67 studies. Their most important finding was that taking aspirin reduces the risk of heart disease in healthy people by 17%. At the same time, the probability of gastrointestinal bleeding in them increases by 47%, and intracranial hemorrhage - by 34%.

“Our work confirms that there is no evidence to support the use of aspirin for primary prevention, that is, in healthy people. Her important finding is that low-dose aspirin is needed to prevent people who already have cardiovascular disease,”Dr. Nicola Veronese of the University of Palermo, co-author of the study, told CNN.