A new study says that older people can have small amount of bleeding in their brain, which is common to those who are ageing.

“Prior work relied on brain imaging to show cerebral microbleeds,” Neurologist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center Dr. Mark Fisher said. “But in this study, deep regions of the brain were closely examined under a microscope, and nearly all subjects had evidence of small areas of bleeding.”

Until now, bleeding was associated with stroke-related injury, hypertension or neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer's. The study appears in the journal Stroke.

Researchers analyzed postmortem brain specimens of 33 individuals, who died between the age of 71 and 105 years, and those who did not have any history of stroke. Of them, 22 were having cerebral microbleeds in the capillaries or small blood vessels of the brain. They said that the areas of bleeding found in the study were small and not life-threatening.

“Drugs that interfere with platelets and blood clotting, such as aspirin, are known to be associated with microbleeds seen in brain imaging studies,” Fisher said. “Our findings suggest that aspirin and other platelet medications may have a different effect on the aging brain than on younger brains.”