Taking low-dose aspirin every day to prevent a heart attack or stroke provides little to no benefit to people without cardiovascular disease but could instead increase the risk of dangerous bleeding, a new report from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force says.
In the last several years, new evidence from various clinical trials has “cast doubt over the use of ‘aspirin for all,’” said Carlos G. Santos-Gallego, a cardiologist at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Mounting evidence suggests that the higher a person’s risk of getting heart disease and the lower their risk of bleeding, the more they benefit from taking aspirin, he said. Bleeding risk, however, increases with age.
Those who benefit most from taking a daily low-dose aspirin tablet are people with greater than a 15% or 20% risk for developing cardiovascular disease over a 10-year period, according to the recommendation, published in JAMA.
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To meet the 10% or greater risk threshold set by the task force, “you’ve got to have a lot of risk factors,” said cardiologist Steven Nissen, chief academic officer of the Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. “Not very many people, even with these recommendations, are going to qualify.”
