Daily Intake of Aspirins can help Double GI Cancer Patients’ Life Expectancy, according to Study

Researchers may have a made ground-breaking discovery, as a new study claims that daily intake of normal everyday aspirins can help to double the life expectancy of cancer patients.

The study had 13,715 patients from Netherlands, as its sample population, and all of them were diagnosed with GI cancer in the period 1998 to 2011. Most of the patients who part of this clinical trial were individuals who had tumors in their colon, rectum and esophagus.

“Given that aspirin is a cheap, off-patent drug with relatively few side effects, this will have a great impact on health care systems as well as patients”, commented study co-author Dr. Martine Frouws, from Leiden University.

Frouws believes that her team’s finding could help pave a new dimension in the treatment of cancer, given how aspirin is readily available and affordable. However the researchers were quick to add that more comprehensive studies were required on this field, to ensure accuracy and consistency of the findings.

The research did regular follow-ups on the participants for a period of 4 years and after using the pain-killer, diagnosis, revealed that they were twice as likely to be alive than the control group (i.e non-users of aspirin) in the study.

Researchers stated that the findings were consistent even adjusting for factors such as age, gender, stage of cancer and other treatments.

Even though the exact mechanism of how these common aspirins can help fight cancer, researchers believe portions, if not the whole, of the answer lies in its anti-platelet properties. Scientists believe that circulating tumor cells (CTCs) can hide themselves effectively from our immune system with the aid of platelets that surround them. Since aspirins block off the function of platelets, this causes the CTCs to get exposed to our immune system.

The team has already begun a randomized, placebo-controlled trial, investigating the effects of an 80-milligram dose of aspirin on elderly patients with colon cancer.

In order to test the effectiveness of their study, researchers linked patient data with drug dispensing information from the PHARMO Institute in Utrecht, the Netherlands, to find how the use of aspirins helped the survival rates of these patients, after they were diagnosed with GI cancer.

“In this study we analyzed each separate prescription per patient, and therefore we were able to achieve a more exact estimate of the effect of aspirin on cancer survival,” added Dr. Frouws.