Low-Dose Aspirin & Anemia

We recently wrote about…

How To Survive A Heart Attack When You’re Alone

…and one of the items was “if you have aspirin readily available, then after calling an ambulance is the time to take it—but don’t exert yourself trying to find some”.

But what of aspirin as a preventative?

Many people take low-dose aspirin daily as a way to reduce the risk of atherothrombosis specifically (and thus, indirectly, they hope to reduce the risk of heart attacks).

The science of how helpful this is both clear and complicated—that is to say, the stats are not ambiguous*, but there are complicating factors of which many people are unaware.

*it will reduce the overall risk of cardiovascular events, but will not affect CVD mortality; in other words, it may improve your recovery from minor cardiac events, but is not likely to save you from major ones.

And also, it has unwanted side effects that can constitute a more relevant threat for many people. We’ll share more on that at the end of today’s article, but first…

A newly identified threat from daily aspirin use

A large (n=313,508) study of older adults (median age 73) were sorted into those who used low-dose aspirin as a preventative, and those who did not.

The primary outcome was incidence of anemia sufficient to require treatment, and the secondary outcome was major bleeding. And, at least 1 in 5 of those who experienced anemia also experienced bleeding.

The bleeding issue was not “newly identified” and will not surprise many people; after all, the very reason that aspirin is taken as a CVD preventative is for its anti-clotting property of allowing blood to flow more freely.

The anemia, however, has been getting increasing scientific scrutiny lately, after long going unnoticed in the wild. Given that anemia also gives the symptom “dizziness”, this is also a significant threat for increasing the incidence of falls in the older population, too, which can of course lead to serious complications and ultimately death.

Here’s the paper itself:

Low-Dose Aspirin and Risk of Anaemia in Older Adults: Insights from a Danish Register-based Cohort Study

Want to know more?

As promised, here’s what we wrote previously about some of aspirin’s other risks:

Aspirin, CVD Risk, & Potential Counter-Risks

Take care!