A Large Study of Aspirin Use Finds Reduced Mortality, Contradicting the Recent ASPREE Study Results

The back and forth over whether regular aspirin use is beneficial continues with the publication of results from analysis of a large patient population that show a 15% reduction in all cause mortality in patients using aspirin. This contradicts the much smaller (but still large in and of itself) ASPREE clinical trial, in which patients using aspirin exhibited a small increase in mortality in comparison to their peers. As in that earlier study, the data here strongly suggests that benefits and risks vary with patient characteristics, such as whether or not a patient is overweight. Aspirin is thought to be a weak calorie restriction mimetic, in that it can produce benefits via upregulation of autophagy to some degree, but it also reduces inflammation and blood clotting, among other effects. That reduction in inflammation is probably the most important benefit. Other studies suggest that the use of NSAIDs like aspirin reduces risk of Alzheimer's disease, which may well be the case for any long-term anti-inflammatory treatment, given the strong role played by chronic inflammation in that condition. This sort of contradictory evidence is characteristic of medications with small effects. One would imagine that senolytics, capable of producing a larger and more reliable reduction of chronic inflammation in old people via clearance of senescent cells, could be put through much the same sort of clinical trials and emerge on the other side with far less ambiguity in the o...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs