MONDAY, Jan. 15 (HealthDay News) -- Taking a low-dose aspirin every other day may reduce the risk of adult-onset asthma, according to a report published in the Jan. 15 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
Tobias Kurth, M.D., Sc.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and colleagues analyzed data from the Physicians' Health Study, in which 22,071 healthy male physicians aged 40 to 84 were randomly assigned to receive either low-dose aspirin or placebo every other day.
Among 22,040 physicians without reported asthma at randomization, the researchers found 113 new asthma diagnoses in the aspirin group compared to 145 in the placebo group, which corresponded to a hazard ratio of 0.78. The investigators also found that this apparent 22 percent lower risk was not modified by baseline characteristics such as smoking, body mass index or age.
"These results suggest that aspirin may reduce the risk of the development of asthma in adults," the authors write. "They do not imply that aspirin improves symptoms in patients with asthma; indeed, aspirin can cause severe bronchospasm in some patients with asthma. Because asthma was not the primary endpoint of the Physicians' Health Study, additional randomized trials would be helpful to confirm the apparent reduction in asthma incidence caused by aspirin."
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