Aspirin doubles survival rates among some cancer patients

Taking a daily dose of aspirin has been found to double survival rates in patients with gastrointestinal cancers, shedding new light on what the anti-inflammatory drug can do.

Scientists from Leiden University Medical Center in Leiden, the Netherlands analyzed patient data from nearly 14,000 people who had been diagnosed with cancers in various parts of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, including the colon, rectum and esophagus.

The scientists discovered that patients who took aspirin daily after their cancer diagnosis were more than twice as likely to survive the disease for an average of four years than the patients who didn’t take aspirin. They said the findings were constant even after statistically accounting for patients' sex, age, stage of cancer, or whether they had received surgery, chemotherapy or any other cancer treatment.

“Medical research is focusing more and more on personalized medicine, but many personalized treatments are expensive and only useful in small populations,” Dr. Martine Frouws from Lieden University Medical Center, who led the research team, said in a statement. “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.”

The scientists presented their research Monday at the biennial European Cancer Congress in Vienna, Austria.

Scientists have already shown that aspirin can help patients who have colorectal cancers, though they have cautioned against relying on it as a way to prevent cancer. They think the aspirin works to inhibit the functioning of platelets, a type of blood cell that clumps together to help the blood clot or to repair damaged blood vessels.

Among cancer patients who have what are known as circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which break away from a cancerous tumor and move through a patient’s bloodstream, scientists believe the CTCs may be able to “hide” from the immune system by cloaking themselves in platelets. But by taking aspirin to keep platelets from coagulating, the immune system might be able to better recognize the cancer cells and fight them off.

The Leiden researchers said that a separate randomized, controlled study is currently underway in the Netherlands to look at how a daily dose of aspirin affects survival rates among elderly patients with colon cancer. They hope to be able to expand that trial to look at patients with cancers in other areas of the gastrointestinal tract. They also hope to look at the characteristics of the tumors among the patients who benefitted from the aspirin in the research presented Monday, so as to potentially be able to identify patients they can help in the future.

“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,” Frouws said.