Thursday, December 27, 2007

Low-dose aspirin for heart protection: how low should a past the worst dose be?

Daily aspirin protects the heart, but the dose at which this can be safely expert has never be established. It has long be known that the risks of aspirin--gastrointestinal or brain hemorrhage--cannot be completely eliminate even at the lowest possible doses. An international team of researchers only just determined that daily doses of aspirin as low as 30 mg are tolerable for achieving the anti-clotting dream; whereas doses higher than 75 to 81 mg merely increase the risk of adverse reaction without providing any extramural advantage.


The research troop led by Charles L. Campbell, MD, University of Kentucky, base its conclusions on a review of 11 studies comparing people on different low doses of aspirin after a main stroke, a minor stroke (transient ischemic attack), a heart attack or a recent artery-opening procedure. It was published later month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.


The 11 studies have a combined total of about 47,000 participant (one-third were women) who be followed up to four years. The aspirin doses given in these studies, ranged from 30 mg/daily to 650 mg/twice daily. Though millions of Americans whip low-dose aspirin to prevent cardiovascular problems from occurring in the first place, no studies in this review included participant without heart disease.


Dr. Campbell, the front author of the review was asked by e-mail how low a dose should be taken by folks without heart disease, who be not addressed contained by this review. "The lowest dose I have see evaluated in the primary prevention setting be 100 mg every-other-day in the Women's Health Study," he responded, referring to a 2005 trial that found, even at that low dose the women on aspirin have a higher rate of gastrointestinal bleeding than the women on placebos.


"I typically use 81 mg of uncoated aspirin for primary prevention in any men or women, but would not object to using lower doses among women." (Enteric-coated products be questioned by Dr. Campbell and colleagues because they are not gripped as well as plain aspirin.)


"I suspect the patients I recommend primary prevention for are of difficult risk than the majority of women in the Women's Health Study (more than 40% of whom have NO traditional risk factors for coronary disease)," wrote Dr. Campbell within an e-mail. "My patients are more like the over-65 population within the Women's Health Study where low-dose aspirin be associated with a diminution in MI [heart attack]. I typically avoid alternate sunshine dosing to keep things simple and compliance soaring, but don't have a philosophical objection to that approach any."


Aspirin is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Though gastrointestinal bleeding is usually attributed to other drugs in this class similar to ibuprofen and naproxen, this adverse reaction be most often cause by aspirin in one study that looked at 18,820 hospitalized patients. Of the 1225 patients admitted as a result of adverse drug reaction, low-dose aspirin was identified as one of the most adjectives causes, next to 18% of hospitalizations and 61% of the fatal cases associated beside low-dose aspirin.


Bottom line: The conclusion of this review contradicts the typical dosage suggestion in the U.S.--between 81 mg and 325 mg. A kid aspirin (81 mg) a day is a sufficient dose for protection for citizens with heart disease. People short heart disease were not represented within this review, but the lead author suggests 81 mg uncoated aspirin on a daily basis, though a lower dose could be appropriate for women. No primary prevention trial has have participants taking an aspirin dose lower than 100 mg every other daytime.

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