Is an Aspirin a Day Safe?
- Michelle Gonzalez HHC, AADP
- Sep 23, 2018
- 1 min read
If you're taking an aspirin a day for prevention of heart disease, you might want to rethink that. A large new study on people over 65 years of age, taking baby aspirin for prevention per their doctor's recommendation, found that they were more likely to die of cancer and other causes than those taking the placebo. And it did not prevent heart disease either.
A large randomized controlled trial has just been published in three papers in the New England Journal of Medicine. Together they show a baby aspirin a day actually increased the risk of death, mainly from cancer. So that little pill does not drive down rates of heart disease, disability or dementia.
What are we to do? We need to stop relying on magic little pills to cure our ails and mend our bodies with good nutrition, exercise and destressing activities.