Aspirin may cut Staph risk in dialysis patients

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Aspirin therapy may protect people on dialysis from infection with the potentially life-threatening bug Staphylococcus aureus.

Based on lab studies showing that aspirin has direct anti-Staph effects, Dr. Martin Sedlacek, from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and colleagues theorized that long-term aspirin therapy might reduce the risk of Staph infections in at-risk dialysis patients.

A look at more than 4,700 blood cultures obtained from 872 patients confirmed their theory. Staph infections occurred significantly less often in patients taking aspirin daily to prevent blood clots compared with those not taking aspirin.

The anti-Staph benefit of aspirin therapy was primarily seen with a regular dose of asprin rather than a baby aspirin, the authors note.

In the final analysis, aspirin use lowered the risk of Staph infection by 54 percent. Aspirin therapy was also linked to a reduced risk of a infection with methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, or MRSA, the hard-to-treat version of the bug.

Aspirin therapy, however, seemed to have no effect on the occurrence of infections by other microbes.

The findings, Sedlacek and colleagues conclude, "strongly support" the need for a forward-looking study of aspirin treatment in dialysis patients and other populations at increased risk of Staph infections.

SOURCE: American Journal of Kidney Diseases, March 2007.