Two aspirin a day ‘cuts cancer risk 60%’

MANY thousands of hereditary cancers and deaths could be prevented simply by taking aspirin, a landmark study has found.

Two pills a day cut the long-term risk of bowel cancer in people with a family history of the disease by 60%. There was also evidence of a similar impact on other solid cancers with the same genetic link.

The findings suggest aspirin treatment could prevent tens of thousands of cancers over the next 30 years and possibly save thousands of lives.

Despite taking large doses of aspirin — two 300mg pills per day — patients taking part in the study suffered no undue adverse effects.

Aspirin is known to raise the risk of internal bleeding and stomach ulcers, as well as certain kinds of stroke.

But according to the researchers it could be a risk worth taking for people with a high susceptibility to cancer.

A new investigation is planned which will look more closely at what doses of aspirin are needed to prevent cancer.

The study, entitled CAPP2, provides the most definitive evidence yet of aspirin’s anti-cancer properties.

It focused on patients with Lynch syndrome, a genetic fault that strongly pre-disposes people to bowel cancer and a number of other solid organ cancers.

Around one in 1,000 members of the general population carry the defective genes, which account for one in 30 cases of bowel cancer.

Other diseases linked to Lynch syndrome include womb, ovarian, pancreatic, brain, stomach and kidney cancers.

Those affected are 10 times more likely than average to develop cancer, often at a young age.

Bowel cancer is responsible for more than 900 deaths in Ireland every year.

CAPP2 involved scientists from 43 centres in 16 countries. Between 1999 and 2005, a total of 861 study participants identified as carriers of Lynch syndrome began taking aspirin or a dummy placebo pill.

The treatment went on for two years. Initial analysis of outcomes in 2007 showed no difference in bowel cancer rates between the two groups.

However, in the years that followed treatment, it became clear that aspirin was having a delayed impact.

By 2010 a total of 19 new bowel cancers had been identified among participants given aspirin and 34 among the placebo group. This represented a 44% reduced incidence rate associated with aspirin treatment.

Further analysis singling out the 60% of patients who took aspirin for at least two years revealed an even more striking result. Then there were just 10 cancers in the aspirin group compared with 23 in the placebo group, a difference of 63%.

The findings are published in an online edition of the Lancet medical journal.

Lead scientist Professor John Burn, from the University of Newcastle, said there could be 30,000 people with Lynch syndrome in Britain who might benefit from aspirin treatment.

He said: “If we were to put them all on two aspirins a day now, in the next 30 years or so we would prevent 10,000 cancers.

“On the other hand, this would cause around 1,000 ulcers, so there’s a trade-off. If you could get by on a smaller dose then you could potentially prevent many of these ulcers,” Burn said.

“If we can prevent 10,000 cancers in return for 1,000 ulcers and 100 strokes, in most people’s minds that’s a good deal, especially if you’ve grown up in a family with three, four, five, six people who have had cancer,” Prof Burn added.

“On the other hand, if you’re just in the general population and you don’t have cancer in your family, then that’s going to be a much finer balance.”

When the scientists looked at other cancers linked to Lynch syndrome, diagnosis rates were almost halved by taking aspirin.