Always check with your health care professional before taking any medications.
Wow hi welcome to another episode of talking with docs i’m dr brad weaning and i’m dr paul zalzal and i’m mike heffernan so dr heffernan is a cardiologist we’re bringing in the big guns today to talk about some important cardiology topics on today’s topic we’re going to talk about do i need to take a baby aspirin every day that’s a good question but just before
We start i was reading the text that you sent last night to all of us and you said mike don’t forget to bring some stock pics yes and i’m like am i supposed to be finding out what gamestop is at do i download the reddit app should i have been a cardiologist are we going there yes so you meant pics pictures if we needed for visual aids but so today we’re going
To talk about baby aspirin common thing back in the day take two call me in the morning and certainly for decades there’s been advice to take it is that something that’s still relevant let us know why people take it if we should sure um and and not an easy question to answer right so let’s start with the let’s start with the easiest answer so if you ever had a
Cardiac event if you’ve had a heart attack before or a stroke if you’ve had bypass surgery or an angioplasty those are patients that are considered high risk something bad has already happened so they need to take an aspirin every day and sometimes there’s even something more potent than we use than aspirin but as a general rule those are patients that need to
Take aspirin and reading okay and why what’s aspirin do to the heart so asphalt what aspirin does is something not specifically to the heart but to the blood and so there are three things kind of if you think about in your blood you’ve got the red cells you’ve got the white cells and you’ve got these other component called the platelets and the platelets are
There to kind of make our our blood sticky make it clot if we happen to cut ourselves and so aspirin’s there to kind of make the the platelets less sticky to let it go through a potential blockage or something that’s been fixed okay so aspirin and then when you say a baby aspirin is that what you called it yeah what’s the real like how many milligrams so it’s
A and i know you’ve got international viewers yeah so this is going to vary around the world um so in canada it’s 81 milligrams daily i know in the uk it’s 75 milligrams daily in germany it’s 80 milligrams daily so it really it varies uh but by and large it’s considered low dose aspirin and sometimes here in canada we call it baby aspirin because it’s a it’s a
Low dose so not because it’s four babies nope no don’t give it to your baby right they taste really good the baby ones like you know little pink ones when i was a kid they were orange yeah so but the harder question and is do you take aspirin if you’ve never had anything bad happen to you so you take aspirin because you’re going to prevent a heart attack that’s
A tough one right so i’m a health conscious guy yeah i’m a person i want to do everything i can because i don’t want a heart attack i’m just going to take some baby aspirin right and so that’s not the right answer anymore okay so that was considered a standard people did it all the time and they would come into the office and we didn’t discourage it because we
Truly just kind of didn’t know the answer um but we do have an answer now several years ago there was a study that looked at this and they said okay let’s take a lot of these people that are really low risk half of them are going to be on aspirin half are not going to be on aspirin at all and let’s see how they do and it turned out that yep if you take a low dose
Aspirin and if you’re otherwise well you will reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke but the number is really small and it is offset by your increased risk of bleeding and bleeding in particular from the stomach so in the end a little bit of benefit from heart attack and stroke but you have an increase in risk of bleeding and it was a wash so as a general
Rule for most people who’ve never had something bad happen we say you don’t need to take an aspirin a day right and we look at a lot of treatments that way we always look at the risk benefit ratio so you’re saying for the average healthy adult person the risk benefit ratio does not favor taking an aspirin a day right however if you have had uh something bad
Something bad like like a heart attack then it is recommended yeah and we would always say don’t use this video to change your medication so always talk to your family doctor to your pharmacist because there’s a reason that they’ve probably prescribed that so definitely discuss it with your healthcare professional for sure okay i think that’s a that’s a great
Summary of aspirin do i take it or not so it’s it’s kind of yes sometimes not all the time you know that’s a good summary that’s how that’s how we work here so if you like this video please like it subscribe to our channel and mike thank you very much for taking the time to talk about aspirin with us and welcome you are in charge of your own health we’ll see you next time
Transcribed from video
Daily Aspirin – Should You Take It? Cardiologist explains. By Talking With Docs
