ASPREE leads quest for answers in older adults, says Investigator
“Recent headlines that ‘a daily dose of aspirin may do more harm than good’ have been described by one of Australia’s foremost experts on the drug as crude, sensational and likely to cause undue concern among Australians….”
That’s the introduction printed in the Australian Ageing Agenda in which Professor Mark Nelson responds to a widely publicised UK aspirin study.
Professor Nelson, a practicing GP and Chief Investigator to the ASPREE trial in Tasmania, said the UK study was an analysis of combined results of different studies in mostly middle-aged adults and that findings were not generalisable to the older community.
“There’s a paucity of studies of the elderly and they need to be done because the balance of benefit versus harm is unknown. There are a lot of reasons why the elderly shouldn’t just be looked upon as middle aged individuals who are older, much like we wouldn’t assume medication used in children is the same as when used in adults,” he said.
Read the full interview with the Australian Ageing Agenda. The UK aspirin study was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Updated 1.04.2021