The shocking truth about Aspirin

Ever though about how aspirin actually stops the progress of heart disease? Here is an easy to understand explanation.

If you are one of those people who pops an aspirin every night or tend to have a pill for the smallest of ailments, you might be doing more harm than good to your body. While aspirin has been touted to be the one drug that can help stop the onset of heart disease, author of 'All About Bacteria', Ravi Mantha has a different take on the phenomenon. Here are excerpts from his book.

There have been so many studies on the role of aspirin in reducing heart disease that there is a medical community consensus on this issue: a daily dose of aspirin can reduce your risk of heart disease by wait for this 15 per cent!

There are two problems with this consensus. First, 15 per cent is not very high. Second, no one actually knows why aspirin reduces heart disease. Is it because it is a blood thinner, and thin blood is good for the heart? Does aspirin somehow slow down hardening of the arteries? No one knows.

But let me lay out a conjecture and challenge the medical community to disprove it. I have argued that excess iron increases cortisol and promotes plaque formation. This is the reason why men are more susceptible to heart disease than women in their thirties, forties and fifties. Post-menopause, women's iron levels gradually increase, and they catch up with men in the heart disease stakes in their seventies and eighties. Enter the humble aspirin. Aspirin has been shown to increase microbleeds in the brain according to a well accepted Dutch study. But where else in the body are we bleeding when we take regular aspirin? We know that in larger doses, aspirin causes full-scale bleeding in the stomach and in the gastrointestinal tract. But what about microbleeds in the stomach at lower doses? I conjecture that the reason aspirin reduces the incidence of heart disease is because even in low doses it causes microbleeding in the stomach and gastrointestinal tract. Unlike the Dutch study, where MRI scanners were used to look at microbleeds in the brain, no one has yet looked at the stomach and intestinal tract of aspirin users using MRI scanners. If my conjecture holds, the microbleeds leach out blood and hence iron from the body, and the lower iron levels in turn reduce plaque formation in arteries. If true, this conjecture could revolutionize our thinking on how to delay or reduce the incidence of heart disease. Don't bother with bleeding your gut by taking aspirin, because I will offer you a much safer and healthier prescription to get your iron levels down. Simply go to your nearest blood donation centre and donate a pint of blood. And do this every six months. We are back to bloodletting again. We have so far discussed the role of iron as an essential nutrient for bacterial growth, both in the laboratory and in the human body. This is certainly true of many of the bacteria that are part of the symbiote, which is why maintaining the iron balance is so important in keeping bacterial infections in check. The reason I spent so much time on it is that bacteria that crave iron will gravitate towards animals that hoard it in their blood, including humans, and since this book is about enjoying a long and healthy life, we need to better manage the iron problem. However, any attempt to reduce a subject as complex as human health and symbiote balance to a simple remedy is clearly not going to work in every instance. This is because evolution is a wonder of nature, and the complexity generated by the laws of evolution is massive. Iron balance is a good place to start looking when there are health problems, because iron is an essential nutrient and can easily be imbalanced, particularly if there are changes in our diet, exercise patterns or physiology.

But iron is not the only game in town, as far as bacteria are concerned. There are a few bacterial pathogens that have evolved to cause harm to humans even without using the excess iron stores in the human body. Probably the most famous of them from a human disease standpoint is Borrelia burgdorferi, which is the pathogen that causes Lyme disease. B. burgdorferi uses manganese instead of iron as a growth medium. Manganese is present in both men and women, which is why Lyme disease aff ects both men and women equally. B. burgdorferi not only needs manganese to thrive, but because it competes with the human host for the body's stores of manganese, it causes all sorts of symptoms associated with manganese deficiency, which is a type of anaemia.

Iron, manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper and zinc are next to each other on the periodic table of element and they share many properties; for instance, they are all metallic. The first four are also paramagnetic elements that show magnetic properties. In chemical form, these six metals are essential micronutrients for the human body, and a balance of these chemicals is important to maintain good health. In fact, the chemical form of cobalt in the human body is none other than our friend vitamin B12, which is essential for the functioning of our brain and nervous system. Similarly, human bodies contain almost 10 mg manganese.

A healthy symbiote balance means a healthy immune system balance. When we take antibiotics and temporarily weaken the bacterial symbiote, the immune system can become hypersensitive, causing all kinds of autoimmune diseases. This alone is reason enough to minimize the use of antibiotics in public health today.

Excerpted with permissions from Harper Collins Publishers from the book 'All About Bacteria' by Ravi Mantha. Buy the book here.

You might also like to read:

Toxic shock syndrome in menstruating women who is really to blame?

Hygiene during menstrual periods: 10 things you should know

4 yoga poses to beat menstrual pain they work!

Tried and tested tips to reduce pain during menstrual periods

Endometriosis in women facts you ought to know

Want to know more about menstruation and infections? Check out our Heart diseases and infections topic pages. Health.India.com is now TheHealthSite.com. Follow the all-new site on Facebook and Twitter.