Cancer: Aspirin Can Double Survival Rate For Cancer Patients

Researchers learned that 30.5 percent of patients had used aspirin before their GI cancer diagnosis, according to Medical News Today.

“If aspirin can become a regular treatment for cancer, it can have a large impact on cancer survival and global health”, comments Martine Frouws, MD, of the Leiden University Medical Center department of surgical oncology in The Netherlands, at a recent press conference. While these variations are rare, they can be instrumental in understanding which patients could benefit from aspirin.

The study which took place in the Netherlands used “14,000 cancer patients”. The research team noted that the positive impact was higher among patients who were suggested aspirin dosage after diagnose of cancer compared to those who were already taking aspirin.

A trial is now examining the effect of a daily low dose of 80milligrams of aspirin on the survival of elderly patients with bowel cancer in Holland.

The study found that across each different type of gastrointestinal cancer, nearly 28 percent of the patients survived for a minimum of five years. According to Cancer.org, the U.S. Prevention Services Task Force (USPSTF) has just released the latest “draft recommendations around the use of aspirin to prevent disease, including… colorectal cancer”. However, more research may be needed, specifically involving tumor material from GI cancer patients and finding which patients would have the most to gain from aspirin.

The survival benefit persisted in all analyzed gastrointestinal cancers; however, the benefit was nonexistent among patients with pancreatic cancer, Frouws said. This takeaway was consistent even after Frouws and associates took several variables into account, including age, gender, cancer stage, type of cancer treatment, and whether the patients had other medical conditions or not.

While researchers still aren’t quite sure how aspirin exactly helps prevent death from cancer, they are confident that their results were not influenced by any other factors they failed to consider.

The researchers believe aspirin is so effective because it has a few antiplatelet properties. Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) are thought to hide themselves from the immune system with the help of the clothing of platelets that surround them.

“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”.

In this trial, the effects of aspirin and a dummy “placebo” will be compared.

But while this extraordinary discovery was persistent in all gastrointestinal cancers, pancreatic cancer proved to be resistant to the use of aspirin.