Aspirin Seen Aiding Colorectal Cancer Patients

Aspirin Seen Aiding Colorectal Cancer Patients

By RONI CARYN RABIN
Published: August 11, 2009


It has long been known that people who took aspirin regularly were less likely to develop tumors of the colon, and now a study has found that even after a diagnosis of colorectal cancer, patients who took aspirin had a much better chance of surviving than non-users.

The improvements in outcomes were striking. Patients with colorectal cancer who regularly used aspirin before and after a diagnosis were almost one-third less likely to die of the disease than non-users. Patients who initiated aspirin use only after a diagnosis did even better and had half the risk of dying from the cancer, possibly because of differences in their tumors. The patients were all being treated for nonmetastatic, or localized, cancers, and were followed for almost 12 years on average.

The study, written by researchers from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is being published in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association. An abstract is available online.

“This is a remarkable breakthrough — for a pill that costs a penny,” said Dr. Alfred I. Neugut, a colon cancer expert at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, who was not involved in the research but wrote an editorial accompanying the article. “Aspirin is not a benign drug, so I can’t recommend purely on the basis of this study that someone should take aspirin, but it’s pretty darn close.”

The paper was based on an observational study that followed 1,279 men and women with nonmetastatic colorectal cancer, and thus was not the kind of randomized controlled clinical trial considered the gold standard for determining the course of treatment in medicine.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/health/research/12aspirin.html?hpw

This study was done a long time ago with NSAIDs like sulindac (Clinoril). It found that the drugs caused small polyps, the pre cancerous growths, simply to snap off the colon wall, probably why people on long term NSAID therapy often had positive tests for hidden blood in the stool.

Since aspirin shares so many of the pharmacologic characteristics with the NSAID class of drugs, it's no wonder the action on the colon is the same.

The more we look at aspirin, the more amazing it becomes. We're just very lucky it was put into general use before the restriction of drugs solely by prescription came into being.