The first studies which were done in the 1970’s began to show that the use of a daily aspirin was effective in preventing heart attacks. When a drug study is done there is something called an ethical panel that has control of the test? Two groups of patients are involved. One is given the drug being tested while the other group is given a placebo which is a harmless sugar pill that looks identical to the real drug being given to the other half of the study group.

The doctors and researchers administering the study do not know which group has been given the real drug, and which the placebo. If the doctors knew, they could biased the patients and results unconsciously. Only the ethics panel knows who is in which grouip. This is important for the following reasons. Very rarely does the ethics panel ever interfere and stop the drug study. It will only do this when it realizes that the drug in question is causing HARM. It will then shut down the study.

We have seen aspirin studies where it became so obvious to the ethical panel that aspirin was very powerful and helpful to heart disease patients that it interrupted the study and came to the conclusion that heart disease patients should be on aspirin therapy. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it, and that is why you must discuss the use of aspirin for yourself as a heart disease patient.

One more point on this topic of drug studies. There was one study several decades ago called the Physician’s Health Study. They had problems getting doctors to join the study who were already on aspirin therapy for themselves because they were already firm believers in using aspirin for heart disease. That’s how compelling doctors found the evidence for aspirin therapy to be.

Drug studies and researchers are still trying to come up with the definitive answers to this question of why and how aspirin does what it does. In the interim this is what we know. Aspirin seems to prevent the formation of blood clots which are dangerous because a blood clot in one of your heart arteries will lead to a heart attack, which is fatal initially in half the people that get heart attacks.

We also know that aspirin has anti-inflammatory abilities. This means it brings down inflammation in the body, and not just in the heart arteries, but everywhere. Researchers now believe that inflammatory processes are very much involved in the process referred to as hardening of the arteries.

Aspirin inhibits the cyclooxygenase enzyme. By blocking this enzyme, your body produces less prostaglandin. This in turn causes less blood clots to form, and heart attacks are all about blood clots forming in the heart arteries. If you put it together in easy to understand English, aspirin decreases the ability of the blood to clot, and this means a heart attack is less likely to occur.

The studies are convincing. If you use aspirin regularly under your doctor’s care, you are less likely to have a heart attack. If you have a heart attack, you are likely to have a less severe one than you would have had without taking aspirin. If you have had a heart attack, you are less likely to have a second heart attack if you are on aspirin therapy.

Now there are risks associated with using aspirin. There are no free lunches, sorry to say. Since aspirin can thin out the blood, you have an increased risk of abdominal bleeding, and there is a potential for stomach ulcer risk. If you were to have a stroke, there can be increased risk of brain bleeding or hemorrhaging. At the same time there is less likelihood of a stroke resulting from a blood clot in the brain if you are on aspirin.

You decrease the risks by using the lowest dose of aspirin appropriate for you. If you take an 81 mg dose, it is only about a quarter of the 325 mg. dose that some doctors recommend. The most recent studies seem to indicate that you need somewhere between 80 mg, and 160 mg of aspirin  per day to be effective. If the lower dose works for you as well as the larger dose, than you should be on the lower dose, and the potential for side effects is less with the lower dose because you may not reach the critical threshold necessary for side effects with the lower dose.

Side effects can happen when employing aspirin therapy. Watch for the following and talk with your doctor immediately:

Don’t forget to check out our 200 page report on Heart Disease. Just click below.