Low-Dose Aspirin Prevents Some Cancers

An overview of several randomized trials of aspirin, found that if taken in low doses, the drug can reduce death rates from several common cancers by 20 to 30 percent, and even though the benefits are unrelated to dose, gender or smoking, they increase with age.

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) has contributed to the work started and carried out by Professor Peter Rothwell in Oxford.

The trials the Professor has been working on were aimed, at first, at reducing heart attacks, but they ended by also gathering information on deaths caused by cancer.

The bottom line is that aspirin not only reduces large bowel cancer cases, it also decreases the total deaths due to cancer, since it affects several common individual cancers like lung, stomach, pancreas, esophagus and possibly brain cancer.

The death rates are lowered by 20 to 30 percent, and the benefit has no connection with aspirin dose over 75 mg, with gender or smoking habits, it does however increase with age.

The researchers say that aspirin may need to be taken for at least five years before it offers any protection at all, and even longer for some cancers, but they add that the benefit is generally bigger the longer aspirin has been taken.

Until now, the advice related to aspirin intake was about reducing heart attacks and strokes in people who have already had them.

But people should know that unless they are at risk of these conditions, they should be extremely cautious, because if they take aspirin as preventative self-medication, they put themselves at risk of serious bleeding.

The effects of aspirin on bowel cancer were proven by another study carried out by Professor Rothwell, along with Professor Tom Meade, who is now Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology in LSHTM’s Department of Non-Communicable Disease Epidemiology.

Also, the trial that gave most of the information to this overview, has been the Thrombosis Prevention Trial (funded jointly by the Medical Research Council and the British Heart Foundation), and it was carried out by Tom Meade when he was with the Medical Research Council.

“These are very exciting and potentially important findings,” said Professor Meade.

“They are likely to alter clinical and public health advice about low dose aspirin because the balance between benefit and bleeding has probably been altered towards using it.”

Still, Professor Meade adds that this does not mean everyone should automatically take aspirin, and that it is the job of health professionals and others, to consider the practical implications of the findings.

The study is published in Lancet, reports AlphaGalileo.