Good Morning and Happy New Year!
My name is Wagas Khan
Today I am going to talk briefly about the use of aspirin as a preventive therapy in the general patient population.
There are 2 types of preventive therapies, one is primary intervention and the other one is secondary intervention. The difference between the 2 is with prime intervention, you don’t have any history of cardiovascular disease or stroke history versus second intervention, where you actually have the disease already present or documented, so we talk briefly about use of aspirin in those situations.
For primary intervention I just want to briefly touch base on that, in terms of using aspirin in certain age groups because a lot of people are using the aspirin and we are kind of shying away from using aspirin in certain age 70 and above, because those individuals are very high risk for bleeding with the use of aspirin. We generally do not recommend using aspirin based on different guidelines from the Medical College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association and the United States preventive task force. They are all in support against using of aspirin in age 70 or above as a prime preventive therapy. Also for younger individuals below 40, and in some cases 50 we also do not use aspirin as a prime preventive therapy.
However ages of 50 to 59 or 60 to 69, those 2 age groups that generally at high risk for cardiovascular disease. We recommend using aspirin with those individuals when there is not a high risk of bleeding in those individuals.
Secondary intervention is where you actually have documented cardiac disease or stroke or some type of vascular disease. For those individuals we recommend using aspirin again considering the bleeding risk.
So the bottom line or the message in this particular video we want to give is that patients who are ages 70 or above and have no cardio vascular disease or they are not at high risk for cardiac vascular disease. We recommend not using aspirin as a prime intervention. In young individuals we don’t want to use aspirin as prime intervention. By young individuals we mean generally below 50 years of age, thank you very much.
