The Toronto Star’s Joseph Hall has a good lede on his story: “Aspirin, the little white staple of a million bathroom cabinets, may have struck medicinal gold again.” As he and several other reporters explain, a Mayo Clinic study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology has found that men who take aspirin or other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are 35 percent less likely to report urinary difficulties. These are a common problem in older men as prostates grow larger and pinch the urinary duct. Curiously, Nicole Ostrow, writing for Bloomberg News, says aspirin can reduce prostate problems for half of older men. She also gives the 35 percent figure and doesn’t explain the seeming discrepancy. Ostrow did, however, take care to describe the Mayo study as “observational,” meaning the researchers only collected data on people doing what they already were doing. As she explained, the scientists simply asked 2,447 men to fill out questionnaires every two years from 1990 to 2002. Why it took another four years to add up the numbers was left unsaid.
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