I’ll preface this by explaining that I have antiphospholipid syndrome so aspirin in and out of pregnancy is a way of life for me, and my experience is a bit more than read a few online articles.
Sorry but you’ve given quite a bit of incorrect or outdated advice here. One is potentially dangerous.
- 150mg is the common dose. It’s not been 75mg for years.
- it doesn’t thin the blood that much. Many hospitals will operate on you if you take a daily dose of up to 200mg.
- Gastro resistant aspirin is widely available for less than a pound. It has a coating that prevents gastric problems.
- Nosebleeds aren’t a reason to stop aspirin. Most pregnant women get nosebleeds because of hormonal changes and extra blood volume.
- Omega 3 is nowhere near a comparative substitute. If you can’t take aspirin, clopidogrel (plavix) would be then nearest suitable medication.
The dangerous advice: don’t skip a dose unless you are advised to.
Women like me with clotting issues generally have planned deliveries and are advised to stop taking it in the last 10 days of pregnancy, and it’s very scary knowing we are unprotected for one day let alone 10. Quite a few don’t stop taking it because of the risk of clotting and what that might mean for a pregnancy (I’m not passing opinion on that - like I mentioned it’s a low dose and many hospitals will operate on low dose patients).
The theory behind aspirin is that some women clot easily in pregnancy. These can be tiny clots or big clots. Tiny clots can form in the lining of your womb, preventing implantation, or restricting blood flow to the placenta. They can form elsewhere in the body, break off and travel around the body, picking up sticky little platelet friends along the way, until they end up in the placenta or umbilical cord (or ends up somewhere that causes a problem - or does nothing bad and just breaks down over time).
All women get sticky platelets to some extent in pregnancy. It’s the body’s defence mechanism to stop us bleeding to death in childbirth. Very clever except with anything you can have too much of a good thing, and some women produce more clotting antibodies in pregnancy than others.
Aspirin is an antiplatelet. It works by binding to your platelets and preventing them from sticking together and forming clots. Once it’s bound to a platelet it alters the surface of that platelet forever until the platelet dies at about 10 days old. New platelets come from your bone marrow. Humans have a circadian rhythm which means things in the body happen at the same time every day. Cortisol production peaks at 7-8am. Platelet productivity peaks early morning (this is one of the reasons we take aspirin before bed). About 10% of your platelets are regenerated every day (like most things this is an average so if your platelets only live 8 or 9 days then it’s going to be more like 15%). It’s not a guarantee of preventing clots as it only works on platelets, coagulant factors can still cause clotting, but it’s a good option if sticky blood is suspected to be a problem.
If you take your aspirin before bed on Monday and then skip 2 or 3 doses then that is an awful lot of platelet regeneration. In 3 days at a minimum 30%. So almost a third of your sticky little platelets travelling around your vascular system untreated and with the potential to cause a clot in seconds (that’s how quickly a clot can form). Having had 4
miscarriages due to APS there is no way I would risk missing a single dose. No. Way. There is no magic fix if a clot forms. You ride it out until it breaks down again. Or causes havoc. And you don’t know which one of these will happen.
I had a gastric bleed in my last pregnancy (not from aspirin, from gestational diabetes). I missed a single dose on doctor’s orders and I was under hospital observation the whole time. They gave me my next dose before I went home. That’s how serious it is not to miss a dose if you need it in pregnancy.
Please refrain from giving advice if you aren’t an expert.