Aspirin: Potential Tretament to Colon Cancer

Aspirin A Solution to Colon Cancer

Aspirin, one of the world's oldest and cheapest drugs, has shown astonishing promise in treating colon cancer in people with mutations in a gene that's thought to play a role in the disease.

A major study found that among patients with the mutations, those who regularly took aspirin lived longer than those who didn't. Five years after their cancers were diagnosed, 97 percent of the aspirin users were still alive compared to 74 percent of those not taking the drug.

Aspirin seemed to make no difference in patients who did not have the mutations as what skeptics say.

Still, the results suggest that this simple medicine might be the cheapest gene-targeting therapy ever found for cancer. About one-sixth of all colon cancer patients have the mutated gene and might be helped by aspirin. Moreover,  aspirin costs just pennies a day.

"It's exciting to think that something that's already in the medicine cabinet may really have an important effect" beyond relieving pain and helping to prevent heart attacks, said Dr. Andrew Chan of Massachusetts General Hospital. He and others from Harvard Medical School led the study, which appears in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Cancers of the colon or rectum are a primary cause of cancer deaths worldwide. In fact, more than 140,000 new cases and 51,000 deaths from them are expected this year in the United States.

Numerous studies suggest that aspirin may possibly help fight cancer, especially colorectal tumors. It is often recommended for people who have colon cancer and others at high risk of developing it. But it's not advised for wider use, or for cancer prevention, because it can cause serious bleeding in the stomach and gut.

Posted by George Daniels on Friday October 26 2012, 4:02 PM EDT. Ref: Yahoo. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Health. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0