LukeStebbing comments on Living Forever is Hard, or, The Gompertz Curve - Less Wrong

46 Post author: gwern 17 May 2011 09:08PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 19 May 2011 05:17:28AM 2 points [-]

You've convinced me to look into this.

Cool. I also convinced LukeStebbing, my best friend, to begin taking low-dose aspirin. He researched (i.e. looked up on the Internet) its interaction with moderate alcohol consumption, which I currently don't consume (although if he's right about its health benefits, I should - the problem is that there aren't any massive RCTs demonstrating a clear effect). I'm harassing him now to add a comment about what he learned.

Do you have a link to the metastudy?

The NYT linked to its abstract at The Lancet's website. The full text is behind a paywall.

Have you considered a top level post about this?

If post-ifying long comments is kosher, I could do that - but I really have nothing more to add, except one more thing I remembered. Aspirin and its NSAID relatives share similar-but-different mechanisms of action - aspirin is special because it has irreversible effects, see Wikipedia's article for more info. In particular, this means that other NSAIDs can interfere with aspirin (not in a way that's likely to do nasty damage to you - there are plenty of those interactions - but in a way that blunts aspirin's special effects). As a result, while I used to occasionally take ibuprofen for headaches, when I began low-dose aspirin I stopped doing that. Now, when I have a rare headache, I'll take full-strength aspirin.

Comment author: LukeStebbing 19 May 2011 05:52:10AM *  5 points [-]

I didn't actually do much research; I just went through several pages of hits for aspirin alcohol and low-dose aspirin moderate alcohol. I saw consistent enough information to convince me:

  • never to take them at the same time, sample:

    In a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in the Bronx found that taking aspirin one hour before drinking significantly increases the concentration of alcohol in the blood.

  • that the nasty interactions only seemed to happen at 21+ drinks per week, sample:

    There is no proof that mild to moderate alcohol use significantly increases the risk of upper gastrointestinal bleeding in patients taking aspirin, especially if the aspirin is taken only as needed. However, people who consumed at least 3-5 drinks daily and who regularly took more than 325 mg of aspirin did have a high risk of bleeding.

That, in conjunction with the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, was enough to convince me to combine 81mg of aspirin in the morning with 0-3 US standard drinks in the evening at an average of 1.0/day. I'd like more information, but I haven't had time to dig it up yet and combining them seemed like a lower-risk provisional decision than inaction.

I recommend you do your own research and talk to your doctor, but maybe someone will find that information to be a helpful starting point.

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