12:53 21 March 2012
Sara Reardon, reporter
(Image: Daryl Solomon/Getty Images)
Aspirin just keeps looking better and better as an anti-cancer drug. Two papers published inThe Lancet this week by Peter Rothwell of Oxford University find that the drug not only lowers older people's chance of developing cancer, but also slows the spread of cancer in patients who already have the disease.
The papers add to a growing body of literature on the drug's cancer-fighting ability. Wereported last year that patients at high risk for colorectal cancer who took aspirin for two years had a 63 per cent reduction in developing cancer. John Burn of Newcastle University, UK, who led last year's study, speculated that aspirin might play a role in blocking inflammation and weakening the cancer's ability to spread - the new study suggests it may be aspirin's effects on platelets in the blood that slows the spread of cancer.
Rothwell's group found that middle-aged people who took aspirin daily for just three years had about a 25 per cent lower rate of developing cancer. Aspirin seems to be good for people who already have cancer as well, the group reports: cancer patients who took the drug daily for three years had a 15 per cent lower chance of dying from the disease; after five years, these patients were 37 per cent less likely to die than patients who were not on aspirin.
A second Lancet paper published this week by Rothwell's group found that the "wonder drug" could also prevent existing cancer from spreading to other organs. Cancer patients who took daily aspirin for 6.5 years had almost half the chance of their cancer spreading as those who weren't taking the drug.
It's not quite a miracle cure and shouldn't be prescribed to everyone, researchers warn, since it can damage the gut and cause intestinal bleeding. But researchers are trying to blunt those effects; a study earlier this month found that adding nitric oxide and hydrogen sulphide gases to aspirin increased its potency and helped it better target cancer cells while leaving normal gut cells alone.
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