Hopkins GIM: What's New

Hopkins GIM Faculty Publish in JAMA: Aspirin Therapy Beneficial to Women

A study led by Hopkins GIM professor Dr. Diane Becker, published in the March 22 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), suggests that low doses of aspirin may help prevent heart attacks in women at risk for cardiovascular disease. This challenges the conclusions from several other recent studies, including the federal Women's Health Study, which claimed that low-dose aspirin had no effect in preventing heart attacks in women.

Dr. Becker and her colleagues (Jodi Segal, MD; Dhananjay Vaidya, MD, PhD; Lisa R. Yanek, MPH; J. Enrique Herrera-Galeano, MS; Paul F. Bray, MD; Taryn F. Moy, MS; Lewis C. Becker, MD; and Nauder Faraday, MD) conducted a clinical trial of aspirin at 81 mg/d for 14 days in 571 men and 711 women, comparing how a low dose of aspirin affects platelet clumping - a known cause of heart attack and stroke. They wanted to know whether aspirin, which inhibits the formation of such clot-forming clumps of blood cells, worked to the same degree in men and women. They concluded that although the drug's overall effects on blood cell function were the same for men and women, women's platelets reacted somewhat more strongly to aspirin before the start of therapy and remained so even after treatment.

Click here for the abstract: Sex Differences in Platelet Reactivity and Response to Low-Dose Aspirin Therapy. JAMA. Vol. 295 No. 12, March 22/29, 2006.

Related: March 22, 2006 article in the Baltimore Sun.