An aspirin a day keeps cancer at bay?

Lani · 03-21-2012, 07:54 AM

Three new studies published on Wednesday added to growing scientific evidence suggesting that taking a daily dose of aspirin can help prevent, and possibly treat, cancer.

Previous studies have found that daily aspirin reduces the long-term risk of death due to cancer, but until now the shorter-term effects have been less certain - as has the medicine's potential in patients already diagnosed with cancer.

The new studies, led by Peter Rothwell of Britain's Oxford University, found that aspirin also has a short-term benefit in preventing cancer, and that it reduces the likelihood that cancers will spread to other organs by about 40 to 50 percent.

"These findings add to the case for use of aspirin to prevent cancer, particularly if people are at increased risk," Rothwell said.

"Perhaps more importantly, they also raise the distinct possibility that aspirin will be effective as an additional treatment for cancer - to prevent distant spread of the disease."

This was particularly important because it is the process of spread of cancer, or "metastasis", which most often kills people with the disease, he added.

Aspirin, originally developed by Bayer, is a cheap over-the-counter drug generally used to combat pain or reduce fever.

The drug reduces the risk of clots forming in blood vessels and can therefore protect against heart attacks and strokes, so it is often prescribed for people who already suffer with heart disease and have already had one or several attacks.

Aspirin also increases the risk of bleeding in the stomach to around one patient in every thousand per year, a factor which has fuelled an intense debate about whether doctors should advise patients to take it as regularly as every day.

Last year, a study by British researchers questioned the wisdom of daily aspirin for reducing the risk of early death from a heart attack or stroke because they said the increased risk of internal bleeding outweighed the potential benefit.

Other studies, including some by Rothwell in 2007, 2010 and 2011, found that an aspirin a day, even at a low dose of around 75 milligrams, reduces the long-term risk of developing some cancers, particularly bowel and oesophageal cancer, but the effects don't show until eight to 10 years after the start of treatment.

Rothwell, whose new studies were published in The Lancet and The Lancet Oncology journals on Wednesday, said this delay was because aspirin was preventing the very early development of cancers and there was a long time lag between this stage and a patient having clinical signs or symptoms of cancer.

Rothwell and others said deeper research was now needed into aspirin as a potential treatment for cancer in patients whose disease has not yet spread.

"No drug has been shown before to prevent distant metastasis and so these findings should focus future research on this crucial aspect of treatment," he said.

Peter Johnson, chief clinician at the charity Cancer Research UK, said his group was already investigating the anti-cancer properties of aspirin. "These findings show we're on the right track," he said.

In a written commentary on the research in The Lancet, Andrew Chan and Nancy Cook of Harvard Medical School in the United States said it was "impressive" and moved health experts "another step closer to broadening recommendations for aspirin use".

CoolBreeze · 03-21-2012, 03:11 PM

It's interesting because it also seems to slow the progression of cancer even in women who have mets. I may just have to add a little aspirin to my regimen.

JennyB · 03-21-2012, 03:35 PM

I've been taking a low dose aspirin every day since about 3 months after diagnosis. I don't know if it is at a strength strong enough to help or not but I seem to always be in the small percentage who develop side effects to drugs so am not game enough to take a full strength one!!

gdpawel · 03-21-2012, 04:16 PM

Marya Zilberberg, an independent physician health services researcher, commented on her blog about this:

"Just as the risk of bleeding begins to drop, so does the risk of developing cancer. This could be a complete coincidence, but perhaps not. An alternative explanation is that people who already have cancer, though it may not yet be diagnosed, may be at a higher risk for a bleeding complication. Those who develop a bleeding complication presumably are taken off aspirin. But remember, they may already be harboring a cancer that will rear its head in the near future. But what about those who do not bleed and therefore are able to tolerate aspirin for a longer time? They also seem to have a drop in their risk of incident cancer. But of course this may have nothing to do with aspirin's preventing cancer, so much as with its ability to unmask a cancer that is already present and essentially weed them out from the future risk pool for cancer development. And when you weed out those at a higher risk for clinical cancer, by definition you have a group with a lower than standard risk, creating the potential for a selection bias. Make sense?"

"Conversely, the risk of a cardiac event starts to increase roughly at the same time as the risks for cancer and bleeding begin to drop. This to me suggests confirmation that aspirin may prevent cardiovascular events early in the course of taking it. Furthermore, given my hypothesis above about aspirin's weeding out those with an early cancer, perhaps its cardiovascular impact is for some reason limited to those with an early cancer or with another reason for aspirin-induced bleeding."

"All-in-all the data do not convince me to start taking aspirin -- I am still at odds with Dr. Agus on that. The selection bias that I described above may very well mean that aspirin's role is not as a cancer prevention, but more likely as a sort of a stress test for those with a subclinical cancer. So we are left again with the the chicken-and-egg question. But isn't that, after all, what makes science exciting?"

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk....comes-clearer/

Rich66 · 03-22-2012, 09:12 PM