Task force’s draft recommendation says most adults don’t need a daily low-dose aspirin to prevent a first heart attack or stroke
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“Our message … is if you don’t have a history of heart attack and stroke, you shouldn’t be starting on aspirin just because you reach a certain age,” Chien-Wen Tseng, a member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, told The Washington Post.
The task force is an independent, volunteer panel of experts in disease prevention. Its draft recommendation, now in a public-comment period that must precede final adoption, is against low-dose aspirin use for people 60 and older, and says the decision for people between 40 and 59 would be between themselves and their doctor, warning that “the net benefit of aspirin use in this group is small.”
The new advice would make the task force’s guidelines more closely resemble “those of the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, which were updated in 2019,” Allyson Chiu writes for the Post. “The ACC/AHA guidelines say that low-dose aspirin ‘might be considered’ for primary prevention in ‘select’ adults between the ages of 40 and 70 who aren’t at increased risk of bleeding. The guidelines also recommend against regular aspirin use in people who are older than 70.”