With daily low-dose aspirin use, risks may outweigh benefits, new research says

It’s one of those sentences that everyone knows by the time they hit early adulthood, “An aspirin a day keeps the doctor away.” But does it? Well, according to a trio of studies published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine, no. Turns out that one daily low-dose aspirin doesn’t provide any significant health benefits. Instead, it may actually cause serious harm.

“The primary study was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial — considered the gold standard for clinical trials. Researchers at Monash University in Australia recruited nearly 20,000 people in that country and the United States, with a median age of 74. All of the participants were considered healthy at time of enrollment, with none known to suffer from heart disease, dementia or persistent physical disability.
Half of the study participants received 100 milligrams of aspirin a day; the other half received a placebo. (A typical “low dose” aspirin contains 81 milligrams of the drug).”¹

After almost five years, there was no observable difference between the two groups when it came to “disability-free survival”¹ but they were able to document a higher rate of bleeding in the group that received aspirin, compared to the group that received a placebo. ¹

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In the second study, researchers found that “the risk of major hemorrhage was significantly higher with aspirin than with a placebo.” ¹ And the third study found “higher all-cause mortality … among apparently healthy older adults who received daily aspirin than among those who received [a] placebo and was attributed primarily to cancer-related death.” ¹

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In patients with a history of heart attack or stroke, previous research has shown that the benefits of daily aspirin use outweigh the risks. However, according to these three new studies, taking a daily, low-dose aspirin is- at best- a waste of money for healthy older adults and at worst, puts you at serious risk of internal bleeding and early death.