The overuse of aspirin and other blood-thinning medicines increased the number of strokes in elderly people in the last 25 years, the Lancet Neurology medical journal said.
The treatments, while reducing the risk of strokes and heart attacks in people with heart disease, can hurt healthy people who take the drugs as a preventative measure, professor Peter Rothwell and colleagues at the U.K.
's University of Oxford found.
Stroke is the largest cause of adult disability and the third-biggest killer in the U.S.
, the American Stroke Foundation says. Rothwell looked at data from the four-year Oxford Community Stroke Project, which ended in 1985, and the Oxford Vascular Study, which ran from 2002 to last year. About 4 percent of stroke patients were taking antithrombotics in the earlier study, while 40 percent were on the drugs in the Vascular Study, the researchers found.
This increased use could explain the absence of the expected fall in rates of intracerebral hemorrhage in older patients that should have occurred due to falling average blood pressures over the 25 years, the medical journal said in a statement.
Rates of intracerebral hemorrhage, or a stroke caused by bleeding in the brain, associated with high blood pressure have fallen, the researchers said.
At least two-thirds of intracerebral hemorrhage, or bleeding in the brain, and 50 percent of all strokes happen in patients older than 75, the researchers said.
The increased use of the blood-thinning medicines may soon become the major risk factor for brain hemorrhages, surpassing high blood pressure, they said.
Antithrombotic drugs, such as aspirin, are undoubtedly of overall benefit in older patients with a definite indication, such as a previous heart attack or stroke, but our results emphasize the need for caution in advising widespread use of daily prophylactic aspirin in health older people who are not known to have vascular disease, the authors said in a statement.
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