NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Although it's well known that taking aspirin regularly can lower a person's risk of heart disease, few Americans, it seems, use the common pain reliever for heart health.

A new study finds that use of aspirin for the prevention of a first or second heart attack or stroke is very low, even among adults at increased risk for such events.

Among a nationally representative sample of 1,299 Americans aged 40 or older, overall only 41 percent reported regular aspirin use for cardiovascular prevention.

Only 57 percent of people considered at increased risk for cardiovascular events said they took aspirin regularly.

"Even for those with a known history of cardiovascular disease, aspirin use was only 69 percent," according to a report on the survey in the May issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"We had a feeling that aspirin was being dramatically under utilized but I think what we found was that it was much worse than we expected," study author Dr. Steven M. Weisman, from Innovative Science Solutions in Morristown, New Jersey, noted in a telephone interview with Reuters Health.

"There are many people that should be on aspirin," he continued, "and unfortunately we found that large numbers of people at relatively high risk for heart attack and stroke just aren't getting a recommendation from their doctor, or if they are getting it they aren't hearing it."

Only about one-third of those surveyed said they had talked with their healthcare provider about aspirin. Of those who had done so, 88 percent reported regular aspirin use, whereas just 17 percent of people who did not have a discussion about aspirin with their provider used aspirin regularly.

Doctors, for the most part, "universally embrace aspirin, use it themselves, and recommend it to their patients," Weisman noted. "Yet when you ask the patients themselves as to whether they heard that recommendation, almost all of them report back that their doctor never talked to them about it," he said.

"I think it's clearly on doctor's minds but they either forget to actually mention it or they mention it in such a way that it is not forcefully delivered in a way that the patient hears it," Weisman surmised.

"Because aspirin is an over-the-counter drug and there is no written prescription the information tends to get lost much easier than, say, a statin prescription," Weisman said.

"Doctors and patients both have to own the problem. Doctors have to be more forceful in their recommendation, and patients have to be more active in their follow up," he concluded.