Guest Author - Krissi Danielsson

In browsing the miscarriage news headlines, I came across this article from a campus website to the University of Buffalo. Apparently, some researchers from the university are planning an investigation into aspirin treatment for miscarriages.

If you haven’t heard of it before, low-dose aspirin – usually 75-81mg/day as opposed to a standard headache-level aspirin, which is something like 325 mg – is one fairly common treatment thought to possibly help cases of recurrent miscarriages. Because aspirin acts as an anticoagulant, the idea behind the treatment is that tiny blood clots may block nutrients from the placenta and cause miscarriages, and aspirin may help to prevent this from happening.

Aspirin is usually suggested in cases of antiphospholipid syndrome, a well-known miscarriage risk factor in which the woman’s body makes antibodies to certain components of cell membranes and has the tendency to coagulate abnormally. Often aspirin treatment is used alongside heparin injections but it may also be recommended by some doctors in the absence of heparin as a more low-powered treatment for less severe cases (this was actually the case for me when I saw a reproductive endocrinologist after my third loss).

Yet, as I discovered recently in preparing the manuscript for my upcoming book, the research on using aspirin by itself is somewhat thin, with few studies finding any benefit to aspirin except used alongside heparin.

University of Buffalo’s study is specifically targeting women who have had one miscarriage that is fairly recent, and they are actively looking for participants (the contact information is included in the url linked above). I hope they are able to find some useful information.

I think it would be interesting if someone were able to prove benefit to low-dose aspirin, as this would be a fairly cheap and highly available means of helping a lot of women. I would like to point out, however, to any curious readers that aspirin is also a highly potent drug and should probably not be used except under medical advice. Higher doses of aspirin have, in the past, been shown to increase risks of miscarriages and any dose of aspirin may cause complications for individuals with certain medical conditions.

For more information on the practice of using low-dose aspirin for miscarriages, try the following articles:

Recurrent miscarriage – an aspirin a day?

Baby aspirin, fertility, and miscarriages

Low dose aspirin with heparin improves prognosis in women with recurrent miscarriages