Aspirin may help prevent asthma in women
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In a large study of healthy women, taking low doses of aspirin reduced the occurrence of asthma, investigators at Harvard Medical School report.
Two recently reported studies among adult men and women have indicated a significant reduction in the risk of newly diagnosed asthma associated with regular aspirin use, lead investigator Dr. T. Kurth and colleagues note.
To further investigate, the Boston-based researchers analyzed data from the Women’s Health Study, in which more than 37,000 female health professionals age 45 and older with no previous history of asthma were randomly assigned aspirin 100 milligrams every other day or placebo.
During the next 10 years, there were fewer new cases of asthma diagnosed in the aspirin group (872 cases) than in the placebo group (963 cases).
“The magnitude of the reduction was similar across subgroups of age, smoking status, exercise, postmenopausal hormone intake and randomized vitamin E intake but was absent in those who were obese,” Kurth’s team reports. They note that a similar lack of benefit from aspirin among obese women was observed for the risk of stroke caused by ischemia (restricted blood flow).
The findings appear in the June issue of the journal Thorax.
In an editorial published with the study, Dr. Andrew A. Clayton and colleagues at the Centre for Respiratory Research in Nottingham, UK, point out that women in the aspirin group had a significantly increased risk of gastrointestinal bleeding requiring blood transfusion.
“It is debatable,” they say, “whether such a risk is acceptable in order to achieve the reduction in asthma risk.”
They agree with the Harvard team’s conclusion that “before public recommendations are provided, results from randomized trials are needed that are specifically designed to test whether low-dose aspirin reduces the risk of asthma.”
SOURCE: Thorax June 2008.
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