Some doctors prescribe a “baby aspirin” (81mg) once a day, while others recommend a full-strength (325mg) aspirin tablet. The difference is important because taking aspirin daily can potentially increase your risk of bleeding. Until now, there hasn’t been enough good-quality data to guide doctors’ decisions.
That’s where the ADAPTABLE (Aspirin Dosing: A Patient-centric Trial Assessing Benefits and Long-term Effectiveness) study comes in. Duke Clinical Research Institute is coordinating the study, one of the first to make patients key partners in an effort to gather vast amounts of data quickly and efficiently. People with heart disease and who are at high risk of having a heart attack or stroke are randomly assigned to take an 81mg or 325mg aspirin daily and are followed for up to 30 months. Eventually, as many as 15,000 people around the U.S. will participate.