SPECIAL REPORT: Aspirin In New Powerful Weapon In Cancer Treatment, Evidence From Two Studies

Aspirin Could Double Life Expectancy Of Cancer Patients — Study

© Tim Boyle / AFP

The humble Aspirin pill may become the next revolution in cancer treatment, doubling the life expectancy of cancer patients, according to major new research by Dutch scientists.

Some 14,000 patients in the Netherlands participated in the study, having been diagnosed with gastrointestinal cancer from 1998 until 2011.

Those of them who took aspirin subsequently had a “significant” survival benefit: in the four-year follow-up period, those who took aspirin were two twice as likely to be alive.

Trial co-ordinator Dr Martine Frouws, from Leiden University in the Netherlands, presented the results at the 2015 European Cancer Congress in Vienna and explained why the study could lead to a revolutionary outcome for those suffering from cancer.

"Now we would like to analyze tumor material from these patients to try and discover which ones would benefit from aspirin treatment... Given that aspirin is a cheap, off-patent drug with relatively few side-effects, this will have a great impact on healthcare systems as well as patients,” Dr Frouws said.

The study included most frequent gastrointestinal cancer types, such as colon, rectum, and oesophagus cancer. In a way, it also makes the research unprecedented: previously, only one type of cancer, usually colorectal, was studied, according to the official press release.

Currently, researchers are carrying out another cancer and aspirin-related study in a multicenter, randomized, placebo-controlled trial that is looking into the effect of a daily dose of 80 mg aspirin on elderly patients with colon cancer in The Netherlands.

Why does aspirin help, then? The researchers think it could be due to its antiplatelet effect: platelets are a blood component which stops bleeding by clumping and clogging blood vessel injuries, and some tumour cells are believed to hide themselves from the immune system with the help of the platelets that surround them.

Aspirin inhibits platelets, thus letting the immune system to recognise tumor cells and destroy them.

“Medical research is focusing more and more on personalised medicine, but many personalized treatments are expensive and only useful in small populations. We believe that our research shows quite the opposite – it demonstrates the considerable benefit of a cheap, well-established and easily obtainable drug in a larger group of patients, while still targeting the treatment to a specific individual,” Dr Frouws said.

"In total, 30.5 percent of patients used aspirin pre-diagnosis, 8.3 percent were solely post-diagnosis users, and 61.1 percent had not taken aspirin at all. The commonest sites for tumours were colon (42.8 percent of patients), rectum (25.4 percent), and oesophagus (10.2 percent). Median follow-up time for all patients was 48.6 months, with 28 percent of patients surviving for at least five years," the press release by the Dutch scientists reads.

The researchers’ colleagues, who didn’t participate in the research, were very optimistic about the results.

“Aspirin may serve as the magic bullet because it can target and prevent ischaemic heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, the three major health catastrophes in the third millennium,” ESMO [European Society for Medical Oncology] spokesperson, Professor Nadir Arber, MD, Head of the Integrated Cancer Prevention Center in Tel Aviv, Israel, said.

“We have good evidence that the frequent use of aspirin in the population can prevent some cases of colorectal cancer. Now, Dr Frouws and colleagues show that in over 13,000 patients who were diagnosed with a gastrointestinal cancer, aspirin also improved survival compared with those who did not use it. With more and more data to support the beneficial role of aspirin, we must consider whether we should recommend it to a wider public,” Professor Peter Naredi, the European Cancer Organization scientific co-chair of the Congress, added.

Daily Aspirin Dose Draws Back Obesity-Related Cancer Risks — Study

Simple aspirin could be a powerful weapon for overweight people to reduce any additional risks of developing colon cancer stemming from a genetic predisposition called Lynch Syndrome, a new international study has revealed.

The research led by Newcastle University’s Professor Sir John Burn followed nearly 1,000 patients in 43 medical centers across 16 countries, who suffer from the syndrome which affects genes responsible for detecting and repairing damage in DNA.

The decade-long study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, revealed that being overweight more than doubles the risk of developing cancer in patients with Lynch Syndrome.

Two sets of patients who either took 600mg of aspirin daily for two years or a placebo, simulated medically ineffectual treatment. The results of the 937 patients who took part in the study were reviewed ten years later.

“This is important for people with Lynch Syndrome, but affects the rest of us too. Lots of people struggle with their weight and this suggests the extra cancer risk can be cancelled by taking an aspirin,” Burn said.

Researchers discovered that 55 patients with the syndrome had eventually developed colon cancers – but those who were overweight were 2.75 times as likely to develop this type of a disease.

However, for the patients who were taking aspirin, the risk remained the same regardless of their body mass.

“What is surprising is that even in people with a genetic predisposition for cancer, obesity is also a driver of the disease. Indeed, the obesity-associated risk was twice as great for people with Lynch Syndrome as for the general population,” said Professor John Mathers, Professor of Human Nutrition at Newcastle University.

In addition scientists discovered that every extra unit of body mass index (BMI) above healthy threshold increased the risk of cancer by 7 percent. In order to fight the potential risk of the decease, besides taking aspirin, researchers urged their patients to try and lose weight first as constant use of aspirin can cause stomach ulcers.

“Our study suggests that the daily aspirin dose of 600 mg per day removed the majority of the increased risk associated with higher BMI. However, this needs to be shown in a further study to confirm the extent of the protective power of the aspirin with respect to BMI,” said Professor Tim Bishop from the University of Leeds.

Now the researchers are in the process of recruiting 3,000 more patients for a follow-up study on the effects of different doses of aspirin for Lynch Syndrome patients. Scientists believe that aspirin tackles the root mechanism by changing the cells which are predisposed to become cancerous and want to test this hypothesis further.

“We may be seeing a mechanism in humans whereby aspirin is encouraging genetically damaged stem cells to undergo programmed cell death, this would have an impact on cancer,” says Burns.