Taking an aspirin a day to prevent heart disease doesn’t work, new research has found.
People who don’t have coronary heart disease—where there’s a build-up of plaque in the arteries—are as likely to end up with the condition as those who don’t take aspirin.
Instead, people who have signs of the disease should be taking a statin, say researchers from the University of British Columbia in Canada.
They assessed the heart health of more than 6,000 people, 56 percent of whom had no plaque build-up and the balance had non-obstructive coronary artery disease, where stenosis, or artery narrowing, has blocked less than half of the artery.
But aspirin didn’t stop people developing coronary artery disease, the most common type of heart disease that affects nearly 7 percent of Americans, the researchers found.
(Source: Radiology: Cardiothoracic Imaging, 2022; 4: doi: 10.1148/ryct.210225)
