Okay, maybe not everybody, I don’t think kids need to take them, and if you are sensitive or allergic to aspirin you shouldn’t take them, but other than that is there an adult that can’t benefit from taking a baby aspirin?
When I was in my 30’s my PCP, who happened to be a cardiologist, said that a study he read showed the benefit of baby aspirin to adults. Although I was being treated for elevated cholesterol at the time, I didn’t have a family history of cardiac disease or strokes. Besides a statin he also put me on a daily baby aspirin and said it would help protect me from heart attacks and strokes down the road.
In talking to people my age very few of them take a baby aspirin. Most say they don’t need it yet. I’m not in favor of taking anything you may not really need, but I think this is the exception that proves the rule.
Since the cost is low, the side effects are few, and the benefits are high, at least potentially, why wouldn’t every adult take a baby aspirin? What am I missing?
In general I’m very suspicious of the notion that a healthy human could be even healthier by taking a certain medicine or superfood.
If our bodies required baby aspirin, wouldn’t we crave foods that contain it and/or produce it ourselves?
See the whole antioxidant debacle. Antioxidants fight free radicals, and those are bad. So get megadoses of antioxidants and live longer! Turns out, our bodies need a certain level of free radicals to function properly, and antioxidants can even get in the way of cancer treatments. So taking more antioxidants may shorten your life.
Not a doctor or anything, but what I’ve always heard on this issue is that if you have a lot of risk factors for heart disease, such as obesity, bad family history, perhaps angina (a physical symptom suggesting you genuinely have heart disease), or etc then it makes sense given the best knowledge we have to prescribe you a daily low dose of aspirin as that’s been shown to help. But for healthy persons with none of those sort of indicators, you have to weigh the side effects of taking aspiring every day against a much lesser chance that you have any heart disease that will be aided by taking the aspirin.
I’ve been to a few dozen doctors over the years since being diagnosed with diabetes. one will recommend this and the next something different. I was taking several supplement type pills when a new doctor asked me why I was taking two blood thinners. I allowed as how I didn’t know I was, He pointed out the aspirin and vitamin E(?) I had blood just under the surface of my skin on one arm quite often. He said it was because of the aspirin and Vit E. SO I stopped them both and haven’t seen the problem since. But I live in the tropics where there is less need to thin the blood.
A few months of that and I was doing some not insignificant crapping of blood, not to mention some really annoying tinnitus. It most definitely was not good for me.
The numbers are all over the place from the studies, so I really don’t know.
However this site says that only 1 in 1667 people who took an aspirin a day were helped because they avoided a CVD event (this was primary prevention). I have no idea about the age of the people in question, or what other risk factors they had (many studies on CVD benefits seem to focus on people 50+ in age, but I have no idea about this one).
So if that is accurate, there is a 0.06% a year you will benefit, or a 1.5% you’ll benefit if you do it for 25 years. Or a 98.5% you won’t benefit for 25 years of doing it.
For those with known heart disease or a history of CVD events the numbers are better.