- Did they fall over because they were taking aspirin which made them unsteady? no, they fell over because they were old
- Did they fall over because they were taking aspirin which killed them? see above
- Did they fall on their heads and bleed to death? no, they hit their heads and sustained a subdural haematoma
- What was the red jelly? Are you talking 'blood clot'? Did aspirin do that? the red jelly is blood clot - the subdural haematoma. The aspirin was not entirely responsible - the head trauma started the bleeding, the aspirin prolonged it
- What kind of dose rate did these poor unfortunates use? variable, normally either 75 mg or 150 mg daily
My post was not meant to be sensationalist. I wanted to point out that aspirin (and even worse - clopidogrel....'the dog') can have serious side effects.
Any antiplatelet therapy (aspirin or clopidogrel) or anticoagulation (warfarin) will increase the risk of an intracranial bleed after minor head trauma. It's a fact of life that old people fall over, hit their heads, and have bleeds. It's not common. That's probably why you have never heard of it. But I can assure you that when you are the neurosurgical registrar on call at a tertiary hospital with a neurosurgical catchment area of in excess of half a million people, you will see it.
If we didn't get to them in time, the practiSing pathologists would then have got a crack at them....