Regular Consumption of Aspirin by Healthy People may be Harmful

A new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine warned that regularly taking aspirin in order to prevent heart attacks even though you are healthy may lead to more harm than good. Researchers from St George's University of London observed more than 102,000 patients and found that while regularly taking aspirin did reduce the number of non-fatal heart attacks by 20 percent, there was no reduction in the number of deaths due to heart attacks, cancer or stroke.

Moreover regularly taking aspirin increased the risk of internal bleeding increased by more than 30 percent. Lead researcher Professor Kausik Ray said that their analysis revealed that taking aspirin daily had no visible advantage and instead was a harmful habit.

“If you treat 73 people for about six years you will get one of these non-trivial bleeds. If you treat about 160 people for the same period of time, you're preventing one heart attack that probably wouldn't have been fatal anyway. It suggests that the net benefit for aspirin is not there, it certainly doesn't prolong life. If you think about it the net benefit, actually there is net harm”, he said.

Source-Medindia