Aspirin and Cardiovascular Disease. In the article by P. Ridker et al. titled “A Randomized Trial of Low-dose Aspirin in the Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease in Women” (New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 352, pp. 1293–1304), the researchers noted that “We randomly assigned 39,876 initially healthy women 45 years of age or older to receive 100 mg of aspirin or placebo on alternate days and then monitored them for 10 years for a first major cardiovascular event (i.e., nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke, or death from cardiovascular causes).”