FDA Reverses Its Position on Daily Aspirin
If you haven’t had a heart attack, step away from the aspirin bottle… If you are one of the 40 million Americans who take an aspirin every day, you may want to heed the latest warning from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
After many decades of promoting aspirin, the FDA now says that if you have not experienced a heart problem, you should not be taking a daily aspirin—even if you have a family history of heart disease. This represents a significant departure from FDA’s prior position on aspirin for the prevention of heart attacks.
But the FDA says “not so fast”—and rightly so. Evidence in support of using aspirin preventatively has gone from weak to weaker to nonexistent. This is why I’ve been advising against it for more than a decade. It looks as though aspirin, even “low-dose aspirin” (LDA), may do far more harm than good.
In fact, it is debatable whether or not aspirin has ANY protective benefits against cardiovascular disease, even if you have suffered a heart attack or stroke. Recent scientific studies have uncovered a number of serious side effects, suggesting that whatever aspirin may offer may be overshadowed by its risks, especially when safer natural alternatives exist.
As is true for nearly all medications, the longer we watch for side effects, the more we tend to find—even for drugs like aspirin that have been around for more than 100 years. Just because aspirin is an over-the-counter drug and has been around for more than a century does not mean that it’s harmless.
Not only has aspirin failed to reduce the prevalence of heart attacks and strokes, but the list of its adverse effects seems to grow greater the more that it is studied. Chief among these is gastrointestinal bleeding, as aspirin interferes with your platelets—the blood cells that allow your blood to clot. According to one article, long-term low-dose aspirin therapy may double your risk for a gastrointestinal bleed.14
Aspirin also increases your risk for a brain bleed, especially if you are older. One study found a high mortality rate for elderly individuals who had been taking aspirin prophylactically when they suffered a head trauma, resulting in deadly brain hemorrhage.15
Regular aspirin use also destroys the lining of your gastrointestinal tract, increasing your risk for duodenal ulcers, H. Pylori infection,16 Crohn’s disease,17 diverticular disease, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and intestinal perforations. More than 10 percent of patients taking low-dose aspirin develop gastric ulcers. The damage to your duodenum—the highest part of your intestine into which your stomach contents pass—can result in duodenal ulcers, which are prone to bleeding. Even low-dose aspirin is proven to cause problems. It has also been found that “coated aspirin” offers no gastro-intestinal protection. It only protects Bayer’s bottom line.
Each year, 15,000 people die and 100,000 people are hospitalized as the result of aspirin and other NSAIDs—and these are probably conservative estimates. But aspirin may be one of the oldest killer drugs! Strong historical evidence points to aspirin overdose as a major contributor to high death tolls during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Aspirin toxicity can result in hemorrhage and fluid buildup in your lungs, which can result in death.
Because of these problems and concerns, I have been cautioning patients about the use of aspirin for heart-related conditions for years. There are natural alternatives for reducing heart attack risks.<learn more>
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