Aspirin is a blood thinner, hence should make blood flower easier/faster, hence supply brain with more oxygen, everything else being equal.
I would just take a lemon:
Lemons improve oxygen uptake and brain function
It can indeed improve oxygenation with some risk of bleeding but its effect won’t be even remotely comparable with oxygen
Even while it may not address the causes, it might mitigate the symptoms of high-altitude flight without Oxygen – the slight headache you get during / afterwards…
Is your heartbeat faster at higher altitude (without oxygen supply)? If so, would the higher blood pressure + aspirin increase the risk of stroke? I try to avoid ALL medication.
Your heartbeat speeds up at altitude. The increase is strongly fitness (etc) dependent. It also depends on how regularly you breathe. A surface rate of say 70 might be 100 at FL120 if you are not using supplemental oxygen. There is a well known UK AME who ran a test group through this some years ago (I was in the group) but he is not active here anymore.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0021915082901824 suggests that aspirin does not decrease blood viscosity. There may be more recent papers that suggest that it does in vitro, e.g. http://cardiovascres.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/5/725.short
But the reason Aspirin is generally described as a blood thinner, isn’t that it thins the blood but that it is an antiplatelet agent, and stops it clotting.
This article:
http://www.bmj.com/content/316/7137/1057
suggests that aspirin counteracts production of prostaglandins – which can either cause vasodilatation or vasoconstriction depending. But is this good or bad from the point of view of cerebral oxygenation? If you divert more blood to the peripheries, less might be going to the brain even though your headache has gone.
Overdoses of aspirin cause alkalosis (cause you to breathe more, lose carbon dioxide, and increases the blood’s affinity for oxygen) then acidosis.
Not an expert by any means in high-altitude physiology: simple, it aint.
Of course, if you were going to consider taking this, you would discuss it with your AME.
Your heartbeat speeds up at altitude. The increase is strongly fitness (etc) dependent.
I’m sure that’s true, but I would not assume that fitness helps to cope with hypoxia.
Fitness allows you to have a lower pulse and breathe more slowly than an unfit person. Neither is helpful at altitude. As I understand it a fit person tolerates more CO2, so breathes etc more slowly, but still fast enough to get enough oxygen at sea level,
For Acute Mountain Sickness, at least, there seems to be no link between fitness and susceptibility. Link
I know enough about hypoxia to realise I don’t know enough. As kwlf said: simple, it ain’t. But a hypoxic body is already out of its comfort zone, and like Maoraigh I would not like to push it any further with over-the-counter medicine.
