Article Text
Abstract
Objective Aspirin and non-aspirin non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are preventive against cardiovascular disease (CVD) and several cancer types, but long-term use has been associated with significant health risks, resulting in conflicting recommendations on NSAID use for prevention of CVD and cancer. Previous research indicates that aspirin use increases with age and CVD risk factors and that a large percentage of the US population regularly use analgesics, including NSAIDs, but there has not been a recent, in-depth assessment of NSAID use prevalence, changes in use over time or predictors of NSAID use in the USA.
Methods We used the cross-sectional, National Health And Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1988 to 1994 and three continuous cycles (1999–2004) to assess regular NSAID use prevalence, changes over time and predictors of regular NSAID use.
Results Overall, regular NSAID use increased over time and varied by demographic features. Participants over 60 years of age, women, participants with high body mass index, increased waist circumference or heart disease were significantly more likely to be regular NSAID users. By contrast, non-Hispanic African American and Mexican American participants were significantly less likely to regularly use NSAIDs.
Conclusions This study uses a nationally representative data set (NHANES) to provide an exploration of regular NSAID use patterns over time, highlighting several demographic, lifestyle and clinical conditions associated with regular NSAID use. Understanding who is likely to regularly use NSAIDs enables more targeted messaging both for increasing the preventive benefits and for limiting the toxicities associated with regular use of NSAIDs.
- NSAID use
- CVD prevention
- Cancer prevention
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors JSD designed portions of the analysis, directed its implementation and drafted portions of the manuscript; HYL and H-LP conducted analyses, contributed to the drafting of the Methods section and reviewed the final manuscript; JK and SMA designed and conducted portions of the analysis, drafted portions of the manuscript and reviewed the final manuscript; EB assisted with the data interpretation and reviewed the final manuscript; ETH, SC and ACF-W contributed to the design and interpretation of the study, as well as review and editing of the manuscript.
Funding ACF-W is funded by the American Heart Association (grant no: 14BGIA18740011) and the US Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Research Service Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine. JSD is supported in part by a grant from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Duncan Family Institute for Cancer Prevention and Risk Assessment. SC is the principal investigator of an NCI R25T award (CA057730) and an NCI R25E award (CA056452), which provided EB with support for a summer research experience in cancer prevention.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement All data used in this study are publicly available free of charge from the Center for Disease Control and prevention.