20 Year Prospective Cohort Study

Aspirin, despite some of its affect to be a benefit to people with cardiovascular disease, is believed to have somewhat of an opposite affect when dealing with the gastrointestinal tract. The main objective for this paper was to see if the use of aspirin and or any other type of inflammatory medications had any effect on gastro intestinal bleeding. A 20 year prospective cohort study was used to effectively survey, and monitor a sample of individuals who reported using aspirin and a list of other inflammatory medications that the study deemed as close to aspirin as possible. In order to become a subject in the study, subjects were of male sex, specifically chosen from the HPFS (Health Professionals Follow-up Study) who chose to report their …show more content…

The first was they had longer follow up and much more recent information on the dosage of aspirin use. Second, as stated before, they collected data on aspirin before diagnosis so they concluded this would make the recall from their participants much more accurate. Third they minimized confounding of influence between variables by strategically estimating the different parameters of the use of aspirin as stated before (dosage, frequency etc.). Fourth they came to the conclusion that self-reports on aspirin from the participants would be of high accuracy since they were health professionals. Lastly the updated data they kept minimized residual confounding. There were also 5 limitations stated in the paper as well. The first was the questioning of the reliability of the results since the aspirin was self-selected. The second was the possibility of the number of cases of bleedings recorded in the study may not be a representation of the true number of all cases because it was only in 2006 when they started to assess bleeding in the GI. Third was a possibility for misclassification as stated earlier because they did not have exact dates and causes for their participant’s episode of bleeding. Fourth, as state before since the participant were mostly male, it limited generalizability to both sexes. The final limitation included an inflammatory drug called clopidogrel. In the questionnaire when they asked about the use of aspirin and other drugs similar to it, clopidogrel was on the list but the researchers ended up not take its use into consideration through 2006 even though there were reports of its use. The Study had a good group of male individuals to run their hypothesis on and even included females of similar status as far as eligibility to make it a little more generalizable. I feel it would be interesting and even beneficial to open this study up a bit more to include many different types of participants to possibly collect