Aspirin's Success Is Threat To Research
ASPIRIN is unique. A little white pill so versatile, that it can relieve your headache, ease your
aching limbs, lower your temperature and treat some of the deadliest human diseases. A roundup of
evidence suggests that it helps prevent heart attacks, stroke, and deep vein thrombosis, cataracts,
migraine infertility, herpes, Alzheimer’s disease and even some of the most devastating cancers such
as bowel, lung and breast. It’s a list that continue to grow, which may help to explain why more
than 25,000 scientific papers have been written on aspirin and why an estimated one trillion tablets
have been consumed since the drug was first produced. But just as aspirin really begins to earn its
spurs, the researchers investigating the unknown benefits it might provide, are facing a mountain of
problems that threaten to half much of the ground-breaking work. “Unless we think of new ways to
work, the discoveries, or at least those that can be proven through clinical trials, are going to
dry up” says a researcher. It is now generally accepted that a third of all people at risk from a
cardiac incident will not have one if they take a small daily dose of the drug. Therefore, it is
almost impossible for researchers to give a placebo in an aspirin trial, for fear of a patient
succumbing to a preventable heart attack or cancer. Any researcher who tried to justify such a step
could run foul of ethical guidelines, enshrined in the Helsinki declaration and endorsed by bodies
such as Britain’s Medical Research Council. These state that researchers should do nothing knowingly
to harm the health of their subjects. This dilemma is compounded by a practical problem. Aspirin’s
benefits are now so widely understood that fewer people are willing to take part in a trial in which
they might get a placebo rather than a drug that could save their life. The use of placebos in many
aspirin studies – traditionally the most useful tool for unlocking its new applications – has been
widely abandoned, so providing regulators with sufficient proof of fresh benefits has become harder.
Generation next aspirin
Poly Aspirin is an “elastic” aspirin created by Rutgers University. Being tested, it consists of
about 100 aspirin molecules in a chain. The belief is that it won’t cause a gastric irritation, and
its elasticity means that it could be applied to a source of pain or a wound. Polypill contains
aspirin, a cholesterol-lowering drug, three blood pressure drugs and folic acid. Its creators claim
that if taken by everyone in high-risk categories, it could cut strokes and heart attacks by up to
80 per cent.
