“Our results show that aspirin can proportionally lower the markedly elevated risk in those with multiple risk factors for colorectal cancer,” said study lead author Dr. Daniel Sikavi. He’s a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston.
Aspirin is thought to prevent colon cancer by lowering the production of pro-inflammatory proteins, known as prostaglandins, that can spur tumor development.
But there may be other factors at play, and “aspirin likely prevents colorectal cancer through multiple mechanisms,” according to study co-senior author Dr. Andrew Chan, director of epidemiology for the Mass General Cancer Center.
However, the story of daily aspirin’s role in colon cancer prevention has been a rocky one.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an influential and independent panel of experts, at first recommended low-dose (81 milligrams) aspirin on a daily basis as a means of preventing both heart disease and colon cancer, based on a wide array of data. However, the task force rescinded that guidance in 2016, saying that the risk of bleeding from long-term aspirin use negated any other health benefit.
But might daily aspirin benefit some users more than others?
To find out, Sikavi’s group looked at data from almost 108,000 participants from the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study.
People averaged just over 49 years of age when they entered the study, and the researchers compared colon cancer rates among those who took aspirin regularly with those who did not.
