Aspirin may be OK before bypass

Taking aspirin before heart bypass surgery may help patients recover and survive better, researchers have reported.

Their study, published in the journal Circulation, should reassure surgeons who have advised patients to avoid taking aspirin in the days before surgery because they feared it could cause bleeding, the researchers said.

“Aspirin reduces clotting of the blood, so it can help prevent a heart attack or stroke by making it less likely a clot will form and block an already narrowed artery,” said Dr. Scott Wright, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who led the study.

He and his colleagues studied 1,636 patients getting heart bypass surgery in 2000, 2001 and 2002. They found that 1.7% of those patients who took aspirin in the five days before surgery died in the hospital afterward, compared with 4.4% of those who did not. Those who took aspirin did not have a greater risk of excessive internal bleeding, Wright’s team found.