Patients who used aspirin during their bout with GI cancer were found to be twice as likely to survive than patients who stopped using aspirin after being diagnosed, or patients that didn’t use aspirin at all.
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According to HealthDay, Dr. Arun Swaminath, Director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, cautions that it is too early to fully understand aspirin’s anti-cancer effect.
A new study found that a daily dose of aspirin could double the life expectancy of people with cancer of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract – mainly of the esophagus, rectum and colon. These patients were followed up for a median of 48.6 months. Among all of these patients, 42.8% had colon cancer, 25.4% had rectal cancer and 10.2% had cancer of the esophagus.
In this study we analysed each separate prescription per patient, and therefore we were able to achieve a more exact estimate of the effect of aspirin on cancer survival.
The study itself included 13,715 patients who all had already received a GI cancer diagnosis between 1998 and 2011.
The study which took place in the Netherlands used “14,000 cancer patients”.
In order to figure out how aspirin use after a GI cancer diagnosis impacted the overall health and survival of the patients, the team analyzed the patient data with drug dispensing information from the PHARMO Institute in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
The researchers adjusted for confounding variables such as other medical conditions, age, sex, cancer staging, and so on. At a later date, the study is to cover gastrointestinal cancers and hopes to provide convincing proof that more patients can benefit from aspirin treatment.
The researchers believe aspirin is so effective because it has a few antiplatelet properties.
The research team will continue to study the effects of aspirin on cancer survival rates, as they plan to conduct a randomized, placebo-controlled trial that seeks to determine how an 80 mg dose of aspirin affects elderly patients suffering from colon cancer specifically. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) shield themselves from the body’s immune system via the blood’s platelets. Because aspirin blocks the function of platelets, this may expose CTCs, leaving them open to attack.
The impression of aspirin in most cancers affected individuals was firm after altering them into dominant factors like sexuality, time, degree of the cancer, therapies together with other disorders the fact that the sufferer might be struggling with.
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“Medical research is focusing more and more on personalised medicine”, Dr Frouws will say, “but many personalised treatments are expensive and only useful in small populations”.
