Aspirin Use Fails to Postpone Disability and Improve Survival in Older Individuals

Aspirin is arguably a calorie restriction mimetic, in that it boosts the operation of the cellular maintenance processes of autophagy to some degree. Increased autophagy is a feature of many of the interventions, such as calorie restriction, that slow aging in various animal models. Aspirin can extend life in short-lived species. The fact that an ongoing trial shows it to do no such thing in humans is just one more of the many pieces of evidence to demonstrate that short-lived and long-lived species have a very different plasticity of longevity in response to upregulation of stress response systems such as autophagy. The effect size of benefits resulting from aspirin in old humans is small enough to be overwhelmed by harmful side-effects in a sizable fraction of the population - this is exactly the sort of marginal medical technology that should be sidelined in favor of better approaches to the treatment of aging. European guidelines on the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) do not recommend aspirin for individuals free from CVD due to the increased risk of major bleeding. This advice was subsequently supported by results in moderate risk patients (ARRIVE trial), diabetic patients (ASCEND trial), and in people over 70 (ASPREE trial), which demonstrated that modest reductions in CVD risk were outweighed by the increased bleeding hazard. The primary finding from the ASPREE randomised trial was that in people aged 70 years or over with no known CVD, ther...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs