Guardian: Aspirin 'may double life expectancy of cancer patients'

This headline recently appeared in the Guardian with a number of other newspapers reporting on the same story. The report was about a large study conducted by researchers in the Netherlands. The researchers used national databases to identify people who had been diagnosed with cancer in the digestive system and see whether or not they took aspirin following their diagnosis. They followed this group of nearly 14,000 people over a number of years to see how long they lived after their cancer diagnosis. The results were presented at the European Cancer Congress 2015.

In keeping with other previous studies of this kind, the researchers found that those people who took aspirin were more likely to live longer than those who did not, and that this was particularly notable for people with cancer in the oesophagus (food pipe), colon (large bowel) or rectum. There are some important limitations to this type of study – in particular, there will be many other factors that affect how long a person lives following a cancer diagnosis, and these may differ between those people who did and did not take aspirin. Also, since the information was collected in national databases a number of years ago, it may not be possible to go back and check the details.

The best way to confirm the findings from this and other similar studies is to do a clinical trial. This is the aim of the Add-Aspirin trial. Some participants will take aspirin and others will take a placebo (dummy) tablet – this will be decided at random in order to make a fair comparison. They will be followed up for a number of years to collect all of the relevant information to see whether aspirin can delay or prevent their cancer from returning. This new study further highlights the need for a trial to answer this question once and for all.