Not only does aspirin help prevent heart attacks, but it can also ease their severity and the long-term damage they cause, a new study found.
Permanent damage from heart attacks was completely prevented in half the patients taking aspirin and reduced by 50 percent in the other half, Dr. Pierre Theroux, one of the study's authors, said Wednesday.The findings by cardiologists from Barcelona, Spain, and the Montreal Heart Institute in Quebec will be published in Monday's issue of Circulation, the journal of the Dallas-based American Heart Association.
Theroux, professor of medicine at Montreal University Medical School, and cardiologists with Hospital General Universitari Vall d'Hebron in Barcelona studied 539 patients admitted to the Spanish facility between October 1991 and March 1993.
The patients, who all were admitted with heart attack or stroke symptoms, were asked if they had taken aspirin during the past week. The 214 who had were compared with the 325 who had not.