Aspirin is especially bad medicine once you’ve reached 75

More bad news about aspirin has just come out.

Only two weeks ago, I told you about research from the University of Florida that found aspirin won’t do a thing to help narrowed arteries due to plaque buildup — a type of hardening of the arteries called atherosclerosis.

Now, British researchers have found that if you’re over a certain age, the “severity and consequences” of popping that daily aspirin can be a lot more than you bargained for.

And a worse drug is no answer
Where aspirin is concerned, most of us — doctors included — treat it like an innocent drug that we can take without giving it a second thought.

Well, as this research shows, you need to think a lot more than twice before you start up on an aspirin regime!

A new study published in The Lancet by researchers out of the University of Oxford says that for people 75 and older, taking a daily low-dose aspirin creates a big risk of serious or fatal internal bleeding.

Actually, that risk is said to be 10 times higher than for someone younger.

Considering that it’s estimated around half of the people in this age category in the U.S. take an aspirin daily, this is obviously a danger of great magnitude. And if you’re wondering why your doctor may not know about it, as lead study author Professor Peter Rothwell explains, recommendations that patients take a daily low dose of this blood-thinning drug were based on trials almost exclusively done on younger people.

This study, by contrast, appears to be the very first to look at what the effects might be on those who hit the golden age of 75!

Don’t assume, however, that aspirin is totally safe if you’re younger, because this increased risk of a bleed can happen at any age. In fact, Professor Rothwell looked at several age groups, both under 65 and over 85. And he found an increased risk in all ages — it just keeps getting higher and higher the older you get.

But as important and necessary as this current research is, here’s where the advice starts to go off the rails.

To lower the bleeding danger, the researchers shockingly recommend that seniors should also take those acid-reducing drugs known as proton pump inhibitors — ones like Nexium, Prevacid and Prilosec. That can cut your risk of a bleed triggered by aspirin by up to 90 percent, they say.

Well, Professor Rothwell, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but those PPI drugs also belong on your list of easy-to-find (but incredibly dangerous) meds, probably right next to aspirin!

As we’ve told you over the years, there are numerous ways PPIs can cause you serious harm — for example:

1. These meds can increase your risk of bone fractures, especially in the hips, wrists and spine.
2. They can zap your immune function and leave you wide open for infections, most especially a devastating form of chronic diarrhea known as C. diff.
3. They also can harm your kidneys to the point where you need to be on dialysis. Researchers at Washington University called it damage that happens “silently and gradually over time” and can eventually cause “long-term kidney damage or even renal failure.”
4. Perversely, PPIs can up your risk of a heart attack or stroke — the ultimate irony since patients are told to take that daily dose of aspirin to ward off heart disease!

It all boils down to the absurdity of using a second dangerous drug to mitigate the effects of an initial one. While aspirin certainly isn’t the panacea for heart disease that we’ve been led to believe, PPI meds are not something you should risk taking for any reason.

Instead of counteracting drugs with drugs, here are three risk-free ways you can be good to your heart:

• Never let another food item containing any amount of trans fats cross your lips again. You can tell if a food has any by looking for “partially hydrogenated” oils on the ingredient list, even if the nutrition label says it has zero trans fats.
• Take a daily CoQ10 along with the supplement resveratrol.
• Include more magnesium-rich foods — like dark leafy greens, oily fish, and nuts like almonds and cashews — in your diet.

“Daily aspirin linked to higher risk of bleeding in elderly” Ashley Welch, Jun 14, 2017, CBS News, cbsnews.com