A pair of new studies, published Monday in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, offers contrasting news about aspirin?s potential role in cancer prevention and treatment.
Men who were being treated for prostate cancer and were taking aspirin for other medical conditions were less likely to die of their cancer than men who were not taking aspirin, the New York Times reports.
On the other hand, taking aspirin did not appear to protect postmenopausal women from developing breast cancer, according to Health Day news.
Previous research, some of it by the Harvard researchers involved in this breast cancer study, has shown that aspirin may help lower the risk of developing colon cancer.
There were big differences between the two new studies, explained Stanley Liauw, M.D., author of the prostate cancer study and an associate professor in the department of radiation and cellular oncology at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
The breast cancer study looked at how aspirin might prevent a new cancer from occurring, while the prostate study looked at how aspirin might keep an established cancer from getting worse.
Liauw also told Health Day that the different sites in the body where the two cancers occur may play a role in why aspirin had a dramatic effect in one, but not the other.
In the prostate study, 6,000 men who had undergone either surgery or radiation therapy were followed for 10 years. About 37 percent of the men were already taking some type of anticoagulant, such as aspirin, warfarin or Plavix, when the study began.
Liauw and his team found that those who were taking aspirin had a 57 percent reduction in the risk of death from prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer occurring in men.
Keep in mind, however, that this was not a randomized, controlled trial ? considered the gold standard in clinical research. No dosage information was collected, so researchers cannot say exactly how much aspirin was most beneficial.
But researchers found that the prostate cancer death rate for those taking aspirin was 3 percent, compared with 8 percent for those who did not, the New York Times reported. Also, the aspirin users were significantly less likely to experience a recurrence of prostate cancer or have the disease spread to the bones, the study found.
In the breast cancer study, researchers led by Xuehong Zhang, M.D., an instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women?s Hospital in Boston, tracked nearly 85,000 postmenopausal women, all of whom were working as registered nurses when the study began.
Nearly every two years, the women completed questionnaires on their medical histories and lifestyle, including their routine use of aspirin or other non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs), like acetaminophen.
Over 30 years, more than 4,700 of the women developed some form of invasive breast cancer. Yet, Zhang?s team wrote that? use of aspirin or other NSAIDs did not have any significant impact on lowering either overall breast cancer risk or the risk for a specific subtype, like receptor 2 positive.
Health experts, however, caution that older adults should not begin taking aspirin without first consulting their doctor.
While many Americans use low-dose aspirin to reduce their risk of heart disease, taking aspirin regularly increases the risk for gastrointestinal bleeding and stroke.
In other health news:
Fit at 50 means fewer chronic diseases as you age. Reuters reports that fit 50-year-olds are less likely to get chronic diseases as they age than are couch potatoes, according to a new U.S. study.
Photo: Courtesy Johns Hopkins Medicine
Source: http://blog.aarp.org/2012/08/28/aspirin-and-cancer-may-help-with-prostate-not-with-breast/
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