Longevity & AgingLow-dose aspirin cuts dementia risk 70% in people with a certain genetic profile
Dementia prevention may depend on your genes. Monash University researchers analyzed genetic data from more than 13,500 older adults in the ASPREE Trial, which earlier found no overall dementia benefit from low-dose aspirin. When they scored participants by genetic tendency toward higher platelet counts, a different picture emerged. Among those in the top 20 percent of scores, 1 percent of aspirin users developed dementia versus 3.3 percent on placebo, roughly a 70 percent lower relative risk. The catch is safety: in that same group, major bleeding occurred in 4.4 percent of aspirin users compared with 2.1 percent on placebo. The findings hint that platelet activity may play a role in dementia and that genetics could someday help decide who benefits from preventive drugs. This is a secondary analysis, so it generates a hypothesis rather than a recommendation. Nobody should start aspirin to prevent dementia based on this work.
