Another day, another confusing tudy about ASA

A highly-promoted study from a few weeks ago concluded that in a large population of UK diabetics who are about as high-risk for heart attacks as you can get, a daily dose of ASA did not reduce their chances of suffering a heart attack, and that was very disappointing news to the literally millions and millions of people out there who are currently taking a daily dose of Aspirin to try to head off a heart attack.

Yet although ASA didn’t work at all in that study, one could argue that perhaps those findings apply only to British diabetics and other people at high-risk might still benefit from regular use of ASA.

So, the bad news is that another study of a vastly different population – 2500 Japanese diabetics and which was presented recently at the American Heart Association annual meeting in New Orleans came to pretty much the same conclusion as the UK study, namely that regular use of ASA did not lower the overall chance of suffering a heart attack or stroke in this population.

The fly in the ointment, however, is that there was a hint of benefit from the regular use of ASA in older Japanese diabetics, that is, Japanese diabetics over the age of 65, although the numbers involved in this study were too low to draw any good firm conclusions, since heart attacks are still pretty rare events in Japanese adults.

So what do we learn from this?

The usual, I’m afraid: we need a bigger and better study on a more heterogeneous population to really pin down who should take ASA (currently, the only group that clearly benefits from taking ASA regularly is people who have had a previous heart attack) and who should not (probably, I think, most people taking ASA right now).