By Admin at 4 May 2017, 18:34 PM

Aspirin has long been suggested as a tool to reduce the risk of heart disease in some people, but long-term clinical trials evaluating it for this purpose turned up a lesser known, but equally exciting, potential benefit: cancer prevention.

In preliminary research presented at the American Association for Cancer Research 2017 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., researchers revealed that long-term aspirin use was associated with a reduced risk of premature death — a benefit they linked primarily to a reduced risk of dying from cancers.1

The study involved up to 32 years of follow-up, revealing a 7 percent reduced risk of total mortality in women and an 11 percent reduction in men among those who had taken 0.5 to 1.5 aspirin tablets per week for at least six years.2

A previous study similarly found that long-term aspirin use of the same dosage reduced the risk of cancer, especially gastrointestinal tract tumors.3 Among people aged 50 years and over, the researchers found regular aspirin use could prevent between 18 and 33 cases of colorectal cancers per 100,000 person-years (years of observation time per person).

Even the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends people in their 50s start low-dose aspirin use for the prevention of colorectal cancer,4 giving the therapy a “B” grade, which means there is high certainty that it will lead to a moderate benefit (or moderate certainty that it will lead to moderate or substantial benefit).

Writing in Nature Reviews Cancer, researchers noted, “Several decades of research have provided considerable evidence demonstrating [aspirin’s] potential for the prevention of cancer, particularly colorectal cancer.”5 However, because aspirin can cause gastrointestinal bleeding and other side effects, its usage isn’t appropriate for everyone.

USPSTF recommends low-dose aspirin only for those not at increased risk for bleeding. More research is also needed to determine how aspirin may lower cancer risk. Finding this out may, in turn, help reveal who may benefit most from aspirin.

“Broader clinical recommendations for aspirin-based chemoprevention strategies have recently been established,” the Nature Reviews Cancer article noted, “ … however, given the known hazards of long-term aspirin use, larger-scale adoption of an aspirin chemoprevention strategy is likely to require improved identification of individuals for whom the protective benefits outweigh the harms."6

Sources:

1. Long-Term Aspirin Use and Total and Cancer-Specific Mortality, Presented April 3, 2017
2. Forbes April 16, 2017
3. JAMA Oncol. 2016;2(6):762-769.
4. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force
5. Nat Rev Cancer. 2016 Mar;16(3):173-86.
6. Nat Rev Cancer. 2016 Mar;16(3):173-86.

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