New study warns of aspirin’s risks

follow the study participants for 10 years. The National Cancer Institute says research has suggested that aspirin can lower the risk of colorectal cancer.

“We’re very hopeful,” Dr. McNeil said. “It’s important to see any delayed effects on dementia and cancer.”

There was some hope aspirin would have an impact on dementia, he said. However, at the end of the fiveyear trial, he said, “there was no signal that the incidence of dementia had changed. It didn’t make any difference in the course of the study.”

Pittsburgh dementia specialist Carol Schramke said aspirin didn’t show a strong enough effect on that condition to balance out the risk.

A neuropsychologist for Allegheny Health Network, she said the ASPREE trial “reinforces what we already knew.” People who have hit 65 and 70 without significant heart disease have no medical reason for a doctor to say they should take aspirin, she said.

“It’s good to be reminded that aspirin is not benign,” she said.

One trial participant, Jeanette Smith, 78, of Scott said she enjoyed being a study subject in this and other Pitt-related research. During ASPREE she was diagnosed with breast cancer, had surgery and radiation treatment and has been on medication for three years.

A nurse before having children in 1967, she suspected she was in the aspirin group of the trial when she bled more when injuring herself.

When she finished the study, she said her doctor suggested she continue taking 81 milligrams of aspirin (the common U.S. dosage) for three days a week. She stays active with exercise classes.

She said the trial’s physical exams and memory tests weren’t inconvenient.

“You have to have volunteers, otherwise they’re never going to learn anything,” she said, adding, “It was good, in the way they do blood tests and you get results. If there’s something to know, you find out about it, which is good.” radio program is distributed nationally by NPR each weekday at 10 a.m. It draws 3.6 million listeners each week across 330 stations. His predecessor Diane Rehm was reaching more than 3 million listeners a week in about 200 stations when she signed off after 37 years on Dec. 23, 2016.

“We’re fishing in a bigger pond,” said executive producer Rupert Allman.

Still, Mr. Johnson had his skeptics when he took over the time slot in January 2017. Although he’d been a morning newscaster at KQED in San Francisco and also worked in public radio in Miami, he had no national presence. In fact, he was teaching podcasting at the University of California at Berkeley when, unbeknownst to listeners, he auditioned for the job with a twoday guest stint on Ms. Rehm’s show the previous November.

On Monday, Mr. Johnson looked completely relaxed in his rolled-up shirt sleeves and purple tie while chatting in WAMU’s windowed conference room in D.C.’s Van Ness neighborhood. He had just spent the last hour interviewing one of the biggest names in journalism — Bob Woodward — about one of the country’s most polarizing issues of the day — the Trump White House.

“Just another day at the office,” he said with a grin.

His goal in creating “1A” with Mr. Allman was to engender a space for a welcoming civil dialogue that “wants verbatim quotations from interviews, rather than his own explicit judgments, to shape his analysis. For this book, which covers Mr. Trump’s first 15 months in office, Mr. Woodward has an abundance of explosive material.

Drawing as he does from the assessments of Mr. Trump’s own appointees, Mr. Woodward’s portrait of the president is devastating. Donald Trump, staff secretary Rob Porter concluded, “did not want to be derailed by forethought.” He did not prepare or listen to advice and had no idea how government functioned. He gave himself high marks for everything he said and did.

After learning he had been fired in a presidential tweet, former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus realized that Mr. Trump “has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.”

According to former adviser Steve Bannon, grievance was at the core of Mr. Trump’s character; his belittling of Attorney General Jeff Sessions as “mentally retarded” was “very much like a 14-year-old boy who felt he was being picked on unfairly.” John Dowd, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, Mr. Woodward reveals, could not