The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Study: Daily aspirin use in elderly likely won’t prolong life
Bad news, older Americans — taking an aspirin every day likely won’t extend your lifespan or stave off the effects of aging.
According to a study partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, a large clinical trial looking at the risks and benefits of daily low-dose aspirin in healthy older adults without previous cardiovascular events showed that aspirin did not prolong healthy living free of dementia or persistent physical disability.
The initial findings from the ASPirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly trial were published online Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
ASPREE was a randomized, placebocontrolled trial that enrolled 16,703 participants in Australia and 2,411 in the United States. The study began in 2010 and enrolled participants ages 70 and older. The minimum age of entry for black and Hispanic individuals in the United States was 65 because the ethnic groups are at higher risk of dementia and cardiovascular disease.
ASPREE participants had to be free of medical conditions requiring aspirin use. They were followed for an average of 4.7 years.
Researchers found that treating participants with 100 milligrams of low-dose aspirin per day did not extend their lifespan. Actually, the group taking aspirin had a slightly higher risk of death than the placebo group — 5.9 percent of participants taking aspirin and 5.2 percent taking placebo died during the study.
However, a news release from the NIH cautioned against reading too much into that finding.
“A small increase in new cancer cases was reported in the group taking aspirin but the difference could have been due to chance,” the release stated.
Among the people in the group that took the aspirin, 90.3 percent remained alive at the end of the treatment
without persistent physical disability or dementia, compared with 90.5 percent of those taking a placebo. Rates of physical disability were similar, and rates of dementia were almost identical in both groups.
The researchers also analyzed the ASPREE results to determine whether cardiovascular events took place. They found that the rates for major cardiovascular events — including coronary heart disease, nonfatal heart attacks, and fatal and nonfatal strokes — were similar in
the aspirin and the placebo groups. In the aspirin group, 448 people experienced cardiovascular events, compared with 474 people in the placebo group.
Significant bleeding, a known risk of regular aspirin use, was also measured.
The investigators noted that aspirin was associated with a significantly increased risk of bleeding, primarily in the gastrointestinal tract and brain. Clinically significant bleeding — hemorrhagic stroke, bleeding in the brain, gastrointestinal hemorrhages or hemorrhages at other sites that required transfusion or hospitalization — occurred in 361 people (3.8 percent) on aspirin and in 265 (2.7 percent) taking the placebo.
As would be expected in an older adult population, cancer was a common cause of death, and 50 percent of the people who died in the trial had some type of cancer. Heart disease and stroke accounted for 19 percent of the deaths and major bleeding for 5 percent.