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news.In a large study of healthy male physicians taking a low-dose of aspirin every other day, their risk of receiving an initial asthma diagnosis lowered by 22%.
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Tobias Kurth of the Division of Aging at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Massachusetts, and five associates studied physicians, ages 40 to 84, over a period of 4.9 years. Among the 11,037 individuals who took aspirin, 113 new cases of asthma were diagnosed, as contrasted to 145 in the placebo group.
The Physicians Health Study, which began in 1982, was terminated after 4.9 years when results showed a 44% reduction in the risk of a first heart attack among those randomly assigned to aspirin. Asthma was not the original deductive endpoint of the trial.
According to the authors, the 22% lower risk of newly-diagnosed asthma among those assigned to the low-dose aspirin group was not affected by participant characteristics like smoking, body mass index or age.
They noted that aspirin-intolerant asthma, a problem in which aspirin exacerbates the disease, affects only a small minority of asthma patients. In three large population-based studies, that difficulty affected only four to 11% of the groups.
“These results suggest that aspirin may reduce the development of asthma in adults. They do not imply that aspirin improves symptoms in patients with asthma,” said Dr Kurth.
“Because asthma was not the primary endpoint of the US Public Health Service study, additional randomized trials would be helpful to confirm the apparent reduction in asthma incidence caused by aspirin.”