That’s the good news. The bad news that the intent of the study was to see if aspirin reduced inflammation would it reduce the chance of repeat miscarriage and it didn’t.
A group of women who took low-dose aspirin prior to conception took less time to become pregnant compared with women who took a placebo, according to results of the Effects of Aspirin in Gestation and Reproduction (EAGER) trial.
“It was a surprising finding, but it’s premature to have a take-home message for the everyday clinic,” Robert Silver, MD, chief of maternal-fetal medicine, from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, told Medscape Medical News. “Our study was designed to assess whether preconception treatment with low-dose aspirin would reduce the risk of pregnancy loss in women with previous pregnancy loss, and the answer is it doesn’t.”
The researchers conducted a prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in which they recruited women aged 18 to 40 years with 1 or 2 prior pregnancy losses who were still trying to conceive.
The women were randomly assigned to receive either low-dose (81 mg) aspirin or placebo through 6 menstrual cycles. All patients also received 400 μg of folic acid. If patients had a positive pregnancy test or confirmed pregnancy, treatment and follow-up continued through the pregnancy.
Daily low-dose aspirin use led to a significant decrease in time to pregnancy among women with prior losses and to a shorter time to clinically confirmed pregnancy among women with a single documented loss at less than 20 weeks during the past year. However, differences were not significant in the broader cohort.