Gastric Mucosal Damage by Aspirin

After aspirin was introduced by the Bayer Company of Germany in 1899, it rapidly gained an established place in medical therapy. Its potent antiinflammatory, antipyretic, and analgesic properties, together with the absence of obvious side effects, made its success certain. As well as becoming a first-line drug for the general relief of severe pain and for the treatment of chronic inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid disease, it has become the most widely used of all household remedies for a variety of minor ailments. In the United Kingdom and the U. s., it is marketed in at least 320 proprietary preparations,1 with consumption in the U. S. estimated at the staggering figure of 20 billion tablets per year.2 Use of aspirin in such large amounts must in itself provide some guarantee as to its relative safety. However, over the last four decades there has been an increasing interest in its gastric side effects.