New research confirms that regular use of low-dose aspirin can benefit women as well as men, but the study also indicates that the drug helps women differently.

For years, doctors have been advising many patients to take a daily, low-dose aspirin to protect against heart attack and stroke. The advice was based on extensive studies. But although doctors were suggesting the aspirin regimen to both men and women, the aspirin research had been done mainly on men.

That changed this month with the release of a 10-year study of 40,000 women and how they respond to aspirin therapy.

The new research, led by Dr. Julie Buring, found that women do benefit from aspirin, but in different ways than men. “For example,” she said, “aspirin in what’s called ‘primary prevention among apparently healthy people’ does work on cardiovascular disease for both men and women. But for men it reduces the risk of a heart attack, and for women it appears to reduce the risk of stroke.”

In a VOA interview, Dr. Buring, who is an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, explained that these differences in aspirin’s effectiveness reflect the fact that heart disease itself affects men and women differently.

“We know that men and women do differ with respect to cardiovascular disease,” she said. “A man gets heart disease about 15 years earlier than a woman does. So it should be of no surprise that an agent such as aspirin might really have a different effect or a different risk-to-benefit ratio.”

And there are risks involved in using aspirin, even a dose as small as 100 milligrams every other day, as in this study. Aspirin is a powerful drug, which helps prevent blood clots from forming. That’s why it can help prevent or even treat some cardiovascular events. But there is a downside, too. Aspirin increases the risk of bleeding in the stomach or brain, and it may interact with other medicines.

Dr. Buring points out that although there are differences between men and women, there are also similarities in how the two sexes respond to aspirin. Take the group known as “survivors of a prior event.” “They’ve had a heart attack or a stroke,” she said. “For those people, whether you are a man or a woman, aspirin has been clearly shown to reduce the risk of dying of that event or having another event.”

Commenting on the findings, cardiologist and women’s health advocate Nieca Goldberg stressed the importance of aspirin for women who have certain risk factors. “For instance, women who have diabetes or a family history of heart disease,” she told NBC television’s Today show. “Women who have already had a heart attack or heart surgery should be on an aspirin a day, and we know from other studies [that] these women who are at high risk for heart disease aren’t getting the aspirin.” Dr. Goldberg is head of cardiac rehabilitation at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital.

There are several reasons why previous studies on heart disease focused on men - including possible bias in the male-dominated research community. But study author Julie Buring allowed that it’s also true that, at a given age, men are more likely to have a heart attack. “The studies that were done first were among men, because at any given age men have a higher risk of having a heart attack than women do,” she pointed out. “But that also meant that the recommendations that were made for women were made on the basis primarily of data in men.”

As the massive Women’s Health Study indicates, that is finally changing.

The head of the U.S. National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, said in a written statement that many women, especially those over age 65, will benefit from taking a low-dose aspirin every other day. But she stressed the importance of checking with your doctor first.

The study on women and aspirin is being published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Buring announced the findings March 7 at the American College of Cardiology.