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medpundit |
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Wednesday, March 09, 2005Until now, doctors have widely recommended low-dose Aspirin therapy for both genders, even though that advice was based on studies that mostly included men. But when researchers tested Aspirin on nearly 40,000 women, they found the women who received a placebo were no more likely to have a first heart attack than those who regularly took Aspirin for 10 years. The study (full pdf version here for free), however, was heavily skewed towards younger women, who are already at a low risk of heart attacks. Although the mean age of the participants was 54, 60% of them were younger than 54, 30% were between 55-65, and only 10% of them were over 65. And the study did find that aspirin reduced the risk of both heart attacks and strokes in this last group, which also happens to be the subset at highest risk for those ailments. It could be that women who have heart attacks at young ages have some other factor responsible for their heart disease (like their genetic makeup) that isn't amenable to aspirin therapy, wherease elderly women have the same sort of coronary artery disease that men have, caused more by the effects of aging than anything else. And that it's this latter sort of heart disease that responds to aspirin therapy. Moral of the Story: If you're an elderly post-menopausal woman with no history of prior heart disease, it's probably worth it to take one baby aspirin a day. NOTE: Another criticism of the study is the dosage of aspirin therapy they used. Instead of studying the widely used 81mg of aspirin a day, the study used 100mg. The higher dose would mean a higher incidence of side effects from the drug, which in fact, the authors did report. A better study would have looked at the more commonly used dosage. posted by Sydney on 3/09/2005 08:41:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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