Taking a low dose of aspirin every other day reduces the risk of being newly diagnosed with asthma by a fifth, according to new research.
The findings are the result of a study of 22,071 healthy male physicians aged 40-84 over nearly five years in the US.
It is estimated that around 470,000 people suffer from asthma in the Republic.
Results published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine showed the low dose of aspirin decreased the risk of receiving an initial asthma diagnosis by 22 per cent.
Among the 11,037 individuals who took the medicine, 113 new cases of asthma were diagnosed, as opposed to 145 in the control group.
Dr Tobias Kurth, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Massachusetts, who led the research, said: "These results suggest that aspirin may reduce the development of asthma in adults."
But he added: "They do not imply that aspirin improves symptoms in patients with asthma." In a small minority of cases aspirin can exacerbate the disease.
Prof Martyn Partridge, chief medical adviser to Asthma UK, said: "This interesting American study suggests that use of aspirin could have a protective effect with regards to the likelihood of developing adult onset asthma.
"The relevance of this to the overall 'epidemic' of asthma is limited by the realisation that most asthma develops in childhood when the use of aspirin should be avoided for other reasons, but the study is nevertheless of interest from a mechanistic point of view.
"Unless patients know that they can take aspirin safely, its use should be discouraged because of the risk of potentially serious sensitivity reactions," Dr Partridge said.