More evidence why sex and gender matter: aspirin and metabolic syndrome

摘要

The puzzle of aspirin and sex' is an editorial recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. In it Richard Levine supports the increasing demand that clinical research should be organised to account for the biological differences between women and men [1], The investigators in the Physicians' and Women's Health Study [2,3] produced two landmark studies on the use of aspirin in asymptomatic people, the results of which segregate according to sex. The Physician's Health Study showed that aspirin significantly (44% in men 50 years of age or older who did not have clinical evidence of coronary disease) reduced the risk of myocardial infarction. But there was no significant effect on the risk of stroke. The Women's Health Study [3] on the other hand showed that aspirin has no significant effect on myocardial infarction but is associated with a 24% reduction in the risk of ischemic stroke.