New risk model suggests most middle-aged aspirin use may be unnecessary
A new analysis suggests that using a newer cardiovascular risk model could dramatically shrink the number of middle-aged adults who should consider aspirin for heart disease prevention. The study, which applied the Predicting Risk of Cardiovascular Disease EVENTS (PREVENT) equations to a national sample, found that far fewer people would be eligible for aspirin than when using older risk calculators. In the United States, among adults aged 40 to 59 without cardiovascular disease, 8.3% were identified as aspirin candidates under the traditional pooled cohort equations, but only 1.2% qualified under PREVENT. Among those who met the older criteria, nearly nine in ten would not meet PREVENT’s threshold, and of the roughly 7.6 million adults who reported taking aspirin for prevention, about 97% did not meet PREVENT’s eligibility.