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An Aspirin a Day
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Business New Haven
11/29/1999
By: Tammy Rachau
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NEW HAVEN - Heart-attack victims can benefit as much from taking one aspirin a day following their trauma as from taking one aspirin along with a powerful anti-clotting drug, a Yale study shows. The study, one of the largest of its kind, appears to settle the controversy over the best long-term treatment for heart attack sufferers: aspirin or the anti-clotting drug Coumadin. The study recommends aspirin alone; it is cheaper and, unlike Coumadin, does not require monitoring to regulate the dosage.
The six-year randomized study included 5,059 subjects, all of them U.S. veterans. Half of the patients in the trial were given 162 mg of aspirin and the other half were administered 81 mg of aspirin plus a variable dose of Coumadin.
“There was no difference between the two groups in terms of total mortality, cardiovascular mortality, non-fatal myocardial infarction, and non-fatal stroke,” said Michael Ezekowitz, professor of internal medicine and cardiology at the Yale School of Medicine. “It means there is no added value to adding Coumadin to aspirin.”
The Combined Hemotherapy and Mortality Prevention study (CHAMP) was released at the American Heart Association meeting in Atlanta.
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