Aspirin and asthma

According to a news release on Eurekalert this week:

“In a large, randomized, placebo-controlled study of 22,071 healthy male physicians, taking a low-dose of aspirin every other day lowered the risk of receiving an initial asthma diagnosis by 22 percent.”

Good news it seems, yet another reason for buying aspirin and bumping up profits for the manufacturers of this apparent panacea. But, what gets me is the precision with which the news release tells us how many volunteers were in the trial. 22,071 exactly. How could they keep tabs on such a large number of healthy male physicians. I bet there were at least a handful who dropped out, but didn’t get deleted from the original list. It’s not like they could have got them all together in a big hall and counted them one-by-one through the door checking as they go that they’re all taking part.

Just saying around 22,000 would have done, even though the spare 71 are important as individuals and count just like everyone else, most readers really don’t need to know.