A recent study from Sweden reveals that some people may be able to keep colorectal cancer from coming back by taking a little dose of aspirin every day. Scientists at the Karolinska Institute and Karolinska University Hospital did the study.
The clinical trial included 626 individuals with stage 1 to 3 colon or rectal cancer. All of them had certain genetic alterations in their tumors, especially in the PIK3 signaling pathway. This was the first randomized experiment to explore the idea that aspirin could help tumors with these mutations, even if earlier studies had suggested it might.
The results were promising: people who took aspirin every day were up to 55% less likely to have their cancer come back within three years than people who took a placebo. Only 7.7% of people in the aspirin group had their cancer come back, while 14.1% to 16.8% of those in the placebo group had it come back, depending on their genetic mutation.
A study in the New England Journal of Medicine says that low-dose aspirin could be an essential way to stop cancer from coming back in some genetically specified individuals.
Anna Martling, a surgeon at the Karolinska Institute, said, “Even though we don’t fully understand all the molecular links yet, the findings strongly support the biological rationale and suggest that the treatment may work especially well in genetically defined subgroups of patients.”
The researchers think that these findings could be important all throughout the world and change the way doctors treat colon and rectal cancer. Martling also talked about how useful aspirin is in real life:
She remarked, “Aspirin is a drug that is easy to find and very cheap compared to many modern cancer drugs, which is a good thing.”