AARP Hearing Center
If you don't have heart disease, there's little to no benefit to popping a daily low-dose aspirin, and, in fact, this practice may dramatically raise your odds of suffering a life-threatening brain bleed, according to a new research paper published this week in the medical journal JAMA Neurology.
The review, which examined 13 studies with more than 130,000 patients, found that the risk of intracranial hemorrhage (brain bleed) was 37 percent higher in those who took a daily aspirin, compared with those who took nothing or a placebo.
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Overall,
incidence
of brain bleeds was still quite rare: only two additional cases for every 1,000 people. But brain bleeds themselves can be life-threatening and can permanently affect your ability to talk, think and move freely, says Amit Khera, M.D., director of the Preventive Cardiology
program
at the UT Southwestern Medical Center. What's more, this latest finding adds to a growing pile of evidence against using aspirin as primary prevention for heart disease.
Last March, for instance, the American College of Cardiology published new guidelines recommending against routinely giving aspirin to older adults who don't have a history of heart disease. “The thinking on this has dramatically changed just in the last year,” says Khera, a coauthor of the guidelines.
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