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Study: Aspirin May Help Treat Some Colon Cancers
By Marilynn Marchione
NEW
YORK (AP) — Aspirin, one of the world’s oldest and cheapest
drugs, has shown remarkable promise in treating colon cancer in people
with mutations in a gene that’s thought to play a role in the
disease.
Among patients with the mutations, those who regularly took aspirin lived longer
than those who didn’t, a major study found. Five years after their cancers
were diagnosed, 97 percent of the aspirin users were still alive versus 74 percent
of those not taking the drug.
Aspirin seemed to make no difference in patients who did not have the mutations.
This sort of study can’t prove that aspirin caused the better survival,
and doctors say more research must confirm the findings before aspirin can be
recommended more widely. The study wasn’t designed to test aspirin; people
were taking it on their own for various reasons.
Still, the results suggest that this simple medicine might be the cheapest gene-targeting
therapy ever found for cancer. About one-sixth of all colon cancer patients have
the mutated gene and might be helped by aspirin. And aspirin costs just pennies
a day.
“It’s exciting to think that something that’s already in the
medicine cabinet may really have an important effect” beyond relieving
pain and helping to prevent heart attacks, said Dr. Andrew Chan of Massachusetts
General Hospital. He and others from Harvard Medical School led the study, which
appears in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Cancers of the colon or rectum are a leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide.
More than 140,000 new cases and 51,000 deaths from them are expected this year
in the United States.
Several studies suggest that aspirin may help fight cancer, especially colorectal
tumors. It is often recommended for people who have colon cancer and others at
high risk of developing it. But it’s not advised for wider use, or for
cancer prevention, because it can cause serious bleeding in the stomach and gut.
What has been lacking, doctors say, is a good way to tell which people might
benefit the most, so aspirin’s risks would be justified. Chan’s study
suggests a way to do that.
It involved 964 people diagnosed with various stages of colon cancer who were
among nearly 175,000 participants in two health studies based at Harvard that
began in the 1980s. Every two years, they filled out surveys on their health
habits, including aspirin use.
Most had surgery for their cancer, and many also had chemotherapy. They gave
tumor tissue samples that could be tested for gene activity. Researchers focused
on one gene, PIK3CA, that is involved in a key pathway that fuels cancer’s
growth and spread. Aspirin seems to blunt that pathway, so the scientists looked
at its use in relation to the gene.
In those whose tumors had a mutation in that gene, regular aspirin use cut the
risk of dying of colon cancer by 82 percent and of dying of any cause by 46 percent
during the study period of about 13 years.
Only two of the 62 regular aspirin users whose tumors had the mutated gene died
within five years of their cancer diagnosis versus 23 of 90 non-aspirin users
with such a mutation.
The results are “quite exciting,” said Dr. Boris Pasche, a cancer
specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who wrote an editorial
that appears with the study in the medical journal. Half a dozen drugs are used
to treat colon cancer, but only one meaningfully extends survival in people whose
cancers have not widely spread, he said.
“Now we may have aspirin. That’s why it’s a big deal,” Pasche
said.
In the study, the dose of aspirin — baby or regular — didn’t
seem to matter, just whether any aspirin was regularly used.
The test for the gene is not expensive and is simple enough that most cancer
centers should be able to do it, Chan and Pasche said.
Researchers warn that aspirin may not be responsible for the improved survival
seen in this study. Differences in how the patients’ cancer was treated
could have played a role.
This page and its contents ©2012
Metropolitan News Company, Inc.
