Daily aspirin pill can cut bowel cancer risk by 74%

Just one pill of aspirin a day can keep bowel cancer development at bay, a new study has found.

The study, by researchers at Oxford University, has found that a dose of 300mg a day for five years reduced the incidence of bowel cancer by 74 percent in the following 10 to 15 years.

Professor Peter Rothwell, who led the research, said that taking aspirin would not dramatically harm people at high risk of bowel cancer, especially those who had a close family relative with the disease.
"What we are saying is that for a subgroup of people at high risk of bowel cancer, they probably aren't going to be dramatically harmed by taking aspirin," the BBC quoted him, as saying.

"They may have some risk of bleeding in the stomach, but they will see potentially significant benefits in the reduction of their colon cancer risk. In that situation, I think taking aspirin daily would be worthwhile," he added.

An accompanying review of 30 observational studies also further supported the findings that taking medium-to-high doses of aspirin for a decade or more could help reduce the risk of developing bowel cancer by half or 70 percent.

The protective effect of aspirin appeared to be consistent regardless of age, sex, race or country of origin.

Writing in the Lancet, Dr Andrew Chan, from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said that though the findings have given "convincing evidence" that taking aspirin can reduce the incidence of bowel cancer, he warned that they were not "sufficient to warrant a recommendation" for its use, given the potential risks.

"With the concerns about the potential risks of long-term aspirin use and the availability of alternative prevention strategies - such as screening - these findings are not sufficient to warrant a recommendation for the general population to use aspirin for cancer prevention," he said.