Low-Dose Aspirin Therapy Did Not Prevent Type 2 Diabetes

Low-dose aspirin therapy research result is some kind of a bad news because I thought taking low-dose aspirin has a dual purpose in avoiding cardiovascular events and preventing type 2 diabetes. Now they have just shot down the second benefit and for the research that did, it appears to be legitimate as they have a large number of participants.

Here's what the researchers did. They examined the efficacy of the aspirin therapy for the incidence of type 2 diabetes. They enrolled 38,716 women who did not have diabetes between 1992 and 1995. They randomly divided this set into two groups. One of the groups was assigned to take a low-dose aspirin on alternate days while the other group was given a placebo.

Here's what the researchers found. There was no difference shown by both the placebo and the aspirin groups as to the incidence of type 2 diabetes. As a matter of fact, 849 cases of diabetes was found in the aspirin group while the placebo group had 847 cases of diabetes.

Adverse events and bleeding episodes were higher in the aspirin group though than in the placebo group. The rate of the bleeding episode among the women in the aspirin group was 4.5% while the placebo group showed the rate of bleeding episode as 3.7%.

The researchers conducted this study due to the increasing number of diabetes cases, the high cost of treatment and the influence this has on the cardiovascular disease among women. They felt a need to determine appropriate strategies to prevent this.

The researchers believed that zeroing into both the reduction of diabetes and cardiovascular events was very appealing especially so the risk for both often appear in the same person. So identifying the preventive measures would have made the health condition among these women better.

No one was surprised at the finding because the type of aspirin used was low-dose. They already knew that high dose aspirin have shown that it can decrease the resistance to insulin, thus improvement in the functioning of the beta cells is the result.

Now that the new guidelines on aspirin for the diabetics have arrived, the experts are weighing the pros and cons or rather the benefits and risk of the low-dose aspirin treatment. It looks like that women who are under 60 and men under 50 who have no risk for heart disease should not be on low-dose aspirin therapy.