Don’t Ever Take Aspirin If You Take This Medication

Take a peek in the average medicine cabinet, and you’re likely to find a bottle of aspirin. Commonly used for temporary relief of minor aches and pains, as well as to treat strokes, heart attacks, and other coronary conditions, people across the globe rely on the drug—but according to the latest warnings from researchers at the University of Michigan, there’s now a big reason some folks might want to steer clear of this pill. Read on to find out why popping an aspirin could put your health at risk if you routinely take another common medication, and what alternatives are safe to try instead.

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While it was once termed a “wonder drug“, doctors today are no longer recommending aspirin at the rate they did in decades past. After many years of advising that adults over the age of 50 take a daily low-dose aspirin to prevent first-time strokes and heart attacks, the medical community recently changed its tune.

It’s now recommended that people over the age of 60 do not take the drug daily as a preventative measure—at least not without a recommendation from their healthcare provider. But why has aspirin, previously touted by some as a “miracle drug,” seen such an about-face in the medical community?

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In April 2022, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force issued a statement on aspirin use as preventative medicine. The group found that while using aspirin may have a “small net benefit” in adults 40-59 years old hoping to prevent cardiovascular disease (CVD), it also found “with moderate certainty” that starting an aspirin regime to prevent CVD “has no benefit” for adults 60 years and older.

According to Eugene Yang, MD, MS, and chair of the American College of Cardiology Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease Council, “More and more studies are showing that aspirin for primary preventions show no benefit, but I think there’s a lag where the physicians and clinical providers are not recognizing that taking this aspirin for primary prevention has no benefit.”

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Part of how aspirin works is as a blood thinner, preventing blood clots which can clog vessels and lead to serious medical problems, including death. But by that same token, doctors and scientists are discovering now that when patients are already prescribed another blood thinner by their provider, taking aspirin alongside it can lead to internal bleeding.

Geoffrey Barnes, MD, a cardiologist at the University of Michigan’s Cardiovascular Center, explains that a study he recently co-authored proposed: “Let’s see if we can identify the patients who we don’t need to be on aspirin because they’re already on another blood thinner. Let’s stop their aspirin and let’s see if we can actually avoid those bleeding events.”

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The study included over 6,700 adults who were taking

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