By Margarita Nahapetyan
According to the results of a new study by U.S. researchers, aspirin appears to substantially decrease the risk of breast cancer recurrence and increase the chances of survival in women with a diagnosis.
After analyzing 4,164 women diagnosed with breast cancer between 1976 and 2002, the experts at Harvard Medical School came to the conclusion that breast cancer patients who take aspirin on a regular basis may be able to reduce their risk of dying by half. In particular, the survey showed that breast cancer patients who took aspirin from two to five days a week, cut their risk of developing the disease spread by 60 per cent and reduced their risk of dying from breast cancer by 71 per cent.
The experts also revealed that those women who took aspirin for six or seven days on a weekly basis, had a 43 per cent less risk of having metastasis and a 64 per cent decreased risk of dying from breast cancer. But the most important finding, in the view of researchers, was the overall 50 per cent reduction. The experts noted that they did not have access to aspirin doses, just number of days a week the women were taking their medication.
For the study purposes, a principal author Michelle Holmes of the Harvard School of Public Health, and her colleagues analyzed aspirin use among women at least one year after having been diagnosed with breast cancer. The women in the study, diagnosed with first, second and third stages of breast cancer, were all participants in the Nurses' Health Study. During the follow-up period, which went until June 2006, 341 women died of breast cancer and 400 were found to have distant recurrences, or metastatic disease.
Holmes cautioned that more research is needed in order to confirm the new findings before recommending that patients with breast cancer take aspirin to boost their chances of surviving. Aspirin would never be a substitute for recommended cancer treatments, Holmes said. And aspirin does have negative effects in some people. "It can cause bleeding of the GI tract," she noted and strongly recommended that women should talk to their physician about what is best for them.
Previous research that focused on examining whether aspirin use may decrease the risk of getting diagnosed with breast cancer in the first place have produced mixed results. One of the earlier studies found that patients with colon cancer who took aspirin lived longer when compared to patients who did not take the drug. The new study appears to be the largest to evaluate whether aspirin could help patients who had already been diagnosed with breast cancer.
For now, doctors say that it is unclear how aspirin may produce this benefit. But they speculate that it may be due to the drug's ability to reduce inflammation in the body. Breast cancers produce more inflammatory chemicals than normal breast cells. Lab tests demonstrate that aspirin keeps breast tumor cells from growing and invading other tissue.
The new findings were published this week in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
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