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Comment by leetrout | Hacker News Reader

My neighbor took a daily baby aspirin and finally got tired of it and quit (much to his wife’s chagrin since it was her doing). He had a stroke 2 or 3 days later.

The doctors say the aspirin was helping keep things at bay but I wondered if it was more like his body adjusted for the thinner blood.

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Yeah. You can’t just quit doing something like that without risk. I think suddenly thickening your blood is a risk factor for stroke. But maybe some plaque or something finally detached, no one can say for sure.

That raises a question: how do you safely stop a daily low dose aspirin regimen? Are we talking about cutting tiny pills in half, then quarters, etc. over a period of a month?

In my case it was easy: spend a month in the hospital. This was after a roller skating accident that gave me a huge brain hemorrhage. The hospital doctors went over all my prescriptions and changed nearly everything.

When taking baby Aspirin and having anticipated bleeding (e.g. planned surgery or dental work), hematologist's advice was to start preparing about two weeks in advance: take pill every other day for about a week, then stop for another week.

This paper tells The American College of Chest Physicians' recommendation is stopping 7-10 days in advance, in the clinical study they measured 96 hours (4 days) for "normalizetion of platelet reactivity":

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4008770/

But please speak with your own doctor(s), your medical situation may differ.

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