Heart Attack Support Group
Heart attack is a serious, sudden heart condition usually characterized by varying degrees of chest pain or discomfort, weakness, sweating, nausea, vomiting, and arrhythmias, sometimes causing loss of consciousness. It occurs when the blood supply to a part of the heart is interrupted, causing death and scarring of the local heart tissue.
My doctor put me on low dose Aspin early last fall .Since then I have made progress in improving my diet , fitness and overall heart health. I m going to ask my doctor if the asprin is still needed . Im sure its wise to keep taking it. Has anyone on here stopped taking it and had any issues or concerns in doing so ?
At least this is the view of my cardiologist, I am almost 4 years from my HA, and she does not allow me to stop it even for 3 days to perform a dental extraction.
Jesus
Continue taking it, unless your doctor tells you otherwise. He's your best judge in taking, or not taking, your medications.
Aspirin is a vital part of heart health as a preventative or post heart attack as a way to combat those possibilities of a future heart attack. You stated your doctor put you on a low dose. I am taking 325 mg per day, everyday and have since November 2008 when I had my massive heart attack.
Studies have shown that aspirin is an important part of recovery. It acts as a blood thinner and it is believed to prevent clotting of your blood platelets. This helps to prevent a heart attack or stroke. Aspirin therapy is very common post heart attacks.
Further research has shown that stopping aspirin can or will increase your chance of another heart attack or stroke. Once we have had a heart attack, we are prone to having another, thus stopping aspirin would be a risky action.
I do not understand why some of us think that after our heart attacks and our brush with death we should alter medication. If your cardiologist has prescribed medication it is for our own benefit. Should there be a reaction or side effect to the medication then it is up to the doctor to decide next medication to try.
I have heard from several different people that they do not like taking all of the medication. It is too many pills. Me I take some 11 pills in the am, 1 at 2pm, 8 more at close to bed time, then 4 more just before I go to bed and finally 1 around 10 pm. They do not taste good, some are rather large but they all serve a vital role in my life, they keep me above ground.
Sending blessings.
Jerry
TUESDAY, July 19 (HealthDay News) -- People with heart disease who stop taking their daily low-dose aspirin may put themselves at a greater risk of having a heart attack, a new study finds.
Aspirin taken daily in a low dose (typically between 75 and 300 milligrams) is recommended to help prevent blood clots in patients with heart disease. Yet as many as 50 percent of patients stop taking their aspirin, the researchers noted. This can result in an increased risk of heart problems, but little is known about whether there is an increased risk for heart attack specifically.
The new study suggests heart attack risk does rise when low-dose aspirin is discontinued. Therefore, patients "should be advised that unless there is a high risk of serious bleeding or otherwise recommended by a doctor, aspirin should never be discontinued given its overwhelming benefits," said lead researcher Dr. Luis Garcia Rodriguez, director of the Spanish Center for Pharmacoepidemiologic Research in Madrid.
"Also, patients who need to discontinue aspirin should do so for the minimum time necessary," he added.
The report was published in the July 19 online edition of the BMJ.
For the study, Rodriguez's team collected data on more than 39,500 patients, 50 to 84 years of age, who were part of the Health Improvement Network -- a large database of medical records in the United Kingdom.
Between 2000 and 2007, the patients were prescribed low-dose aspirin (75 to 300 milligrams per day) to prevent heart attack and other cardiac complications.
Over about 3 years of follow-up, Garcia Rodriguez's team found that those who stopped taking aspirin experienced a 60 percent rise in their risk of non-fatal heart attack. That result held true regardless of how long the patients had taken aspirin before they decided to stop.
According to the researchers, the finding translates into four additional heart attacks for every 1,000 patients during the year they stopped taking their aspirin.
"Our study highlights the need for greater awareness of the increased risk of cardiovascular events, such as [heart attack], that is associated with interruption of aspirin therapy," Garcia Rodriguez said.
"If adherence to low-dose aspirin could be improved, the benefit obtained with low-dose aspirin in the general population would be increased," he added.
Dr. Giuseppe Biondi-Zoccai, assistant professor of cardiology at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Modena, Italy, and co-author of an accompanying journal editorial, said that "aspirin is indeed a wonderful drug."
Low-dose aspirin reduces illness and death from heart disease, pulmonary embolism (clots in the lung) and colorectal cancer, he said. It is also remarkably safe, if one avoids it in those at risk of allergic or bleeding complications, and it is cheap, which is also a major plus.
In addition, aspirin helps prevent recurrent events in patients who have already suffered from coronary artery disease, Biondi-Zoccai, said.
"Discontinuing aspirin in such patients is very harmful," he added. "Indeed, patients on aspirin, because they have already suffered from a coronary artery event, face a major health hazard if aspirin is discontinued, even only temporarily, and even if several months or years have passed from their initial heart problem."
Another expert, Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, agreed.
"While aspirin use can increase the risk of bleeding, for most patients with known vascular disease the benefits of daily low dose aspirin exceed the potential risks," he said. "Individuals with cardiovascular disease should understand the benefits of long term aspirin use and that discontinuing their aspirin regimen places them at increased risk for subsequent cardiovascular events. Patients should not discontinue aspirin therapy unless under the advice of their physician to do so."
So obviously it supports what everyone else has said. Challenger52, what is your concern about taking a daily low dosage aspirin? Do you take the safety coated kind to protect your stomach? Also, if that has been one of your concerns, I make sure I ALWAYS eat before I take my meds, I figure I'll give the meds a nice soft cushion of food to land on when they hit my tummy! Plus give me an excuse to take time out for a tasty breakfast including my smoothie!
If I was going to make any unilateral decisions about discontinuing medications (which I have done in the past, by the way) I would cut out the most expensive ones, the most heavily advertised, those with the worst side effects, or those with the most dubious effectiveness. Aspirin fits none of these categories. Doctors recommend it even though they don't get any kickbacks from the drug companies for doing so, which reassures me that it's actually useful.
My current doctor also stipulates that I take coated aspirin due to some studies she followed regarding the actual digestion/absorption rates of aspirin coated vs. uncoated. The studies concluded that coated aspirin is much more effective than uncoated. I love to argue these issues with her just for the sake of argument, but in the face of determination and clinical evidence..... I got nothin'.
I'm going to come off of plavix and up my dose of asprin from 81 to 125 mg/day. Wish me luck!
For those interested: It's a combination of factors:high cost of Plavix being the main factor. I had a bare metal stent and the cardio said that it was so I could come off of plavix in a year's time, and it's been just over a year. I'd stay on the plavix but I have a very high deductible and the high cost is gonna cause me another heart attack if I stay on it. (THAT"S A JOKE, PEOPLE.... LIGHTEN UP!)
Have a wonderful day!
Steve
Damn Sue. You must have a lot of time on your hands. What a duscertation your response was. Fantastic.
I will share a little story I shared about 6 months ago. I was a manager of a Vet. House when one of the tennants grabbed his chest and turned gray. He was an African American and yest they can turn gray. I immediately called 911 and told them that I was going to administer a nitro to see if he would improve until the EMT's arrived. They told me "DON'T YOU DARE". I thought "F**k That and I did it anyway. He became responsive and alert and made it to the hospital alive and kicking. unfortunately a week later he died of massive CHF. I sopke with the doctor on one of the days I went to see him and the "Doctor shook my hand and asked me if I was the ione who gave Gene the nitro tablet. I said, hesitantly, I was, yes. He looked me straight in the eye and said these very troubling words. "You would have better served him, if you gave him an "Aspirin". Those words devestated me coz he died a couple days later and I thought with all my knowledge about my heart, that I killed him out of ignorance. Read what Sue writes here. An aspirin will thin the blood. Turn it from mollasses to alcohol consistency making it easier for the heart to pump through narrow passages. I cried for days and then shared what I had done with my friends here on DS and they all lifted me up by saying that Gene's death, although tragic, saved many lives, by me telling this story.
Yes by all means keep taking your aspirin as directed. Get monthly or quarterly blood wrok. See what your platelette counts are and monitor brusing and bloody stools. Aspirin will wear at your stomach. But the trade off is life with a possible ulcer and not the gracve wuith a diseased heart.
Good post Kiddo,
Best Regards,
Just Joe
Let's see if I can follow that doctor's reasoning. If aspirin is the best thing to administer to someone having a heart attack, then why do they give us nitro?
I need to call the hospital to find out what his name was and where he was....he said he would see me.
I am lazy I guess....or forgetful dumb mostly....ok this is waking me up I will call records and find out who he was.
thanks for the idea here it woke me up.
This is the reasoning. People young like you and me when we experience angina a nitro will alleviate the pain to the point where we might be forward thinking enough to go to the ER. An aspirin although acting differently, does the same thing. A heart which is starved of O2 because of occlusions may be able to react to nitro and allow O2 to reach the heart muscle. Thickened blood because of dehydration or proteins may still not circulate even through dilated blood vessels. So the answer is to carry both. I do always. 325mg aspirin for emergency. Daily I take 81 mg. And also the infamous .4mg nitro life saver.
Good question though.
Regards,
Just Joe
The problem is that you see somebody with symptoms of a heart attack and if you do not know him, it can be or not a heart attack.
There are problems with similar symptoms, even more acute, like a fissure in the aorta, where the nitro or the aspirin can literally kill him.
Then, as far as I know, you might suffer a heart attack for 3 different reasons:
1) The clot in the arteries (at least 90 % of the cases).
2) A miocardial bridge.
3) An arterial spasm.
In the last 2 cases, for different reasons the lumen (inner size) of the arteries it is very reduced and the nitro will not solve it (only slowing the HR in the first case and reduce the spasm with CCB in the second one, will do it) however if the blood get thinner, you have more chances of it to pass through the reduced lumen.
Jesus
Just Joe