June 20, 2023 – Older individuals who take low-dose aspirin day by day have a 20% higher risk Development of anemiashow latest research results.
The study, Published Monday within the Annals of Internal Medicineexamined hemoglobin concentrations in greater than 19,000 healthy adults within the United States and Australia who were 65 years of age and older.
Low levels of hemoglobin, an iron-rich protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body, can result in anemiawhich is common in older people and may cause tiredness, fast or irregular heartbeat, headache, chest pain and pounding or whooshing noises within the ear. It also can worsen conditions corresponding to heart failure, cognitive impairment and depression in people aged 65 and over.
“We knew from large clinical trials, including our … study, that daily use of low-dose aspirin increases the risk of clinically significant bleeding,” said Zoe McQuilten, MBBS, PhD, a hematologist at Monash University in Australia and lead creator of the study. “In our study, we found that low-dose aspirin also increased the risk of anemia during the study, and this was most likely due to bleeding that was not clinically apparent.”
The The US Preventive Services Task Force changed its recommendation on aspirin as primary prevention of heart problems in 2022 and recommends that adults aged 60 and over shouldn’t be began on low-dose aspirin. For adults ages 40 to 59 with a 10-year risk of heart problems of 10% or greater, the agency recommends that patients and health care providers consider the choice to start out taking low-dose aspirin as a matter of principle to fulfill the case The profit is small.
McQuilten said doctors can't find the reason behind many cases of anemia. A study published within the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society In 2021, it was found that a few third of anemia cases had no clear cause.
About 50% of individuals involved in the newest study took aspirin for prevention from 2011 to 2018. That number is prone to have declined after guidelines modified in 2022, in keeping with McQuilten, but could persist in the long run in older patients. The researchers also examined ferritin levels, which function an indicator of iron levels (and might indicate anemia if low levels), firstly of the trial and again after three years.
People who took aspirin were more prone to have lower blood serum ferritin levels after 3 years than individuals who took a placebo. The average decline in ferritin levels was 11.5% greater amongst study participants who took aspirin than amongst those that received a placebo.
The estimated probability of anemia inside 5 years was 23.5% within the aspirin group and 20.3% within the placebo group. Overall, aspirin therapy led to a 20% increased risk of anemia.
Basil Eldadah, MD, PhD, a senior medical officer on the U.S. National Institute on Aging, said the findings should encourage health care providers to talk over with their patients concerning the must take aspirin.
“Someone who is taking aspirin and is older and is not doing so for an indication such as cardiovascular disease should seriously consider whether this is the best treatment option,” said Eldadah, who was not involved within the study.
The study didn’t examine the results of anemia on participants, which he said might be the topic of future research. The researchers said one limitation was that it was not clear whether anemia was enough to cause symptoms that affected study participants' quality of life or whether unknown bleeding caused the anemia.
The researchers also didn’t document whether patients visited their primary care physicians and received treatment for anemia in the course of the study.