Who wouldn’t like to live longer? Younger people generally don’t think about how long they’ll live, but the older one gets, the more the idea of how long he or she will live becomes more important.

When I was a teenager, I did a lot of very dangerous things and had the mindset that if I got hurt or killed, so be it, but I wanted to do and experience a lot of things, like riding bulls. I climbed up a tree after a mountain lion, only to see how close I could get before it jumped down. My brother and I played mumblety-peg, but with our hand guns instead of knives. I rode a motorcycle on the open highway at 100 miles per hour.

Over the years, I’ve grown older and wiser. I do regret some of the things I did, but then again, I don’t regret the memories I have of them. Instead of not caring if I get hurt or killed doing something these days, I do think about trying to stay safer and around longer. I’m not afraid of death, but I don’t want to leave my wife of over 48 years a widow.

That’s why I’m taking measures to try to improve my health. One way is to lose weight and watch what I eat in hopes of putting my type 2 diabetes into remission and lowering my high blood pressure to a safer level. I also take a number of vitamins and supplements to improve my health, again, in hopes of living a few years longer, mostly for my wife’s sake.

What about you? Would you like to live, say a decade longer?

If a new report out of the United Kingdom is right, there just may a way to help extend one’s life longer:

Older people could significantly increase their chances of enjoying a long retirement by taking aspirin regularly, according to new research.

Pensioners who took the drug at least three times a week were almost a fifth more likely to be alive about a decade later than those who did not.

The findings of the study bolster a growing body of evidence about the benefits of aspirin.

A team led by the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland, followed 146,152 Americans over the age of 65 between 1993 and 2008.

They were asked a range of questions, including how frequently they took aspirin, and researchers monitored their health for an average period of 12 years.

Those who took the drug three times a week or more were 19 per cent less likely to have died during that period than those who did not take it, and were 15 per cent less likely to have died of cancer.

In particular, aspirin appeared to have a protective effect for bowel and gastrointestinal cancers, with 29 and 25 per cent fewer cases respectively.

Aspirin comes in two dosage levels in the United Kingdom and the one used in the study was the low-dose aspirin of only 75mg. Here in the United States, the low-dose aspirin comes in 81mg strength.

Should you start taking low dose aspirin if you aren’t already? That’s up to you and your doctor, but you may live long enough to thank the UK researchers.