Does regularly taking aspirin help protect people against heart attacks? The Physicians’ Health Study I was a medical study that helped answer this question. The subjects in this experiment were 21,996 male physicians. Half of these subjects took an aspirin tablet every other day and the remaining subjects took a dummy pill that looked and tasted like the aspirin but had no active ingredient. After several years, 239 of the control group but only 139 of the aspirin group had suffered heart attacks. This difference is large enough to provide convincing evidence that taking aspirin does reduce heart attacks.
