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Comment by sharpshadow | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why they are still referring to acetylsalicylic acid (ASA) as Aspirin. Aspirin today can be a mixture of ingredients but what the described effects are about is ASA.

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A mixture of ingredients? If you mean a standard aspirin tablet, it will have fillers and binders in it to keep the tablet together and help it break down in the GI tract and etc, but in essence anything labeled aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirin

From the first line of Wikipedia:

"Aspirin is the genericized trademark for acetylsalicylic acid (ASA)"

That's why

If I was a copy editor and read the draft title "Scientists crack how acetylsalicylic acid might stop cancers from spreading" I would stop the author right there.

If the title said "acetylsalicylic acid (ASA)", I would not have known what they were talking about. But I do know what Aspirin is.

News to me, what else do they put in it?

Some people are just learning pills are not a single solid block of pure active ingredient.

Yes, that’s me. What else is in aspirin?

Stuff that allows it to form a solid block instead of powder. Stuff to time how long it takes to dissolve (how else can there be fast-acting and slow-acting versions?) Stuff to make the pills large enough to see with your eyes. A grain of sand is about 20 milligrams. Low-dose aspirin is 80 milligrams, but the pill is a much more convenient size than 4 grains of sand. (or 8 grains of sand, since sand is about twice as dense as pure ASA)

A 20mg grain of sand is either not a grain or not sand

Doing the conversion - 20 milligrams is 0.308647 grains So you're correct.

(had to use Google - I only know that there are 7000 grains to the pound)

I am GP and did more research and need to post a correction but it's too late to edit my former comment.

The grain, in terms of weight, is 64.8 milligrams, or much more than a even a course grain of sand, which it turns out, is somewhere around 1 milligram, ranging from 0.04 mg for fine sand to 4 mg for very course sand, average around 0.3.

Excedrin brand in the US has tablets with caffeine and aspirin, for example, but people might just call them aspirin (my grandmother, for example).

ASA is an unfortunate acronym here: You might consider the Accessible Surface Area of immune-system proteins, in accessing interaction with the aspirin molecule!

The actual paper used aspirin:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08626-7

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