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Low-Dose Aspirin May Help Shield You From COVID-19

By Robert Preidt and Ernie Mundell

HealthDay Reporters

MONDAY, March 15, 2021 (HealthDay News) – It's already being taken by millions to help ward off heart issues, and now preliminary research hints that daily low-dose aspirin might also cut your odds of contracting COVID-19.

As the Israeli research team noted, aspirin is an anti-inflammatory and previous studies have shown that it may help the immune system combat some viral infections. According to the researchers, aspirin was widely used during the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, several decades before its activity against RNA viruses was confirmed.

All of this prompted the team to investigate whether taking daily low-dose aspirin might reduce COVID-19 susceptibility, as well as the length of illness if infection does occur.

The dose used in Israel was 75 milligrams (mg); low-dose aspirin in the United States is typically a bit higher, at 81 mg.

The research was led by Eli Magen, from the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, Israel. His team tracked data on nearly 10,500 people who were tested for COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in Israel, from February to the end of June of last year.

Because the study was a look back at prior data, it wasn't designed to show cause-and-effect, only associations. But Magen's group found that people who'd already been taking low-dose aspirin to reduce their risk of heart disease had a 29% lower risk of contracting COVID-19 compared to those who didn't take aspirin, and that rates of aspirin use were much lower among COVID-19 patients than among those who didn't get infected.

Among people who did get COVID-19, the time it took for SARS-CoV-2 PCR test results to go from positive to negative was significantly shorter among those who used aspirin, and the duration of their disease was two-three days shorter, depending upon preexisting health conditions.