Another Reason to Take Aspirin? Bowel Cancer Risk Reduced
Many people already take low doses of aspirin every day to reduce the risk of heart attack and blood clots. Now, a further potential benefit of this cheap, side-effect-free drug has become apparent: taking aspirin every day might reduce the risk of bowel cancer.
Scientific researchers found that taking two tablets a day reduced the rate of bowel cancer amongst nearly 900 people deemed ‘at risk’ of the disease by an amazing 63 per cent.
The research was carried out at Newcastle University and was published in the prestigious journal The Lancet.
The patients were deemed ‘at risk’ because they suffer from Lynch Syndrome, where their bodies can’t detect or repair damage to their DNA, placing them at high risk of developing cancers, especially cancers of the bowel. Those patients were compared with a group of other sufferers of Lynch Syndrome who did not take aspirin and the results were significantly different: far fewer people taking the aspirin developed bowel cancer and also any of the other cancers they were at risk of suffering.
Lynch Syndrome affects one in every thousand people, so there are around 30,000 sufferers in the UK who have it. Lead researcher Professor Sir John Burn said that if all those sufferers took aspirin, 10,000 cancers would be prevented over the course of thirty years and 1,000 deaths might be prevented.
Even if there’s no family history of these cancers, Professor Sir John Burn said, “I think where we’re headed for is people that are in their 50s and 60s would look very seriously at adding a low dose aspirin to their daily routine because it’s giving protection against cancer, heart attack and stroke.
“But if they do that they’ve got to have their eyes wide open. They will increase their risk of ulcers and gastrointestinal bleeds and very rarely they will have a stroke caused by the aspirin.”
