Aspirin for cancer prevention?
The potential benefits of taking aspirin every day to lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes are well-known. Now a trio of reports, two from the Lancet and one from Lancet Oncology, suggest that a daily dose of aspirin may also reduce the risk of developing and dying of cancer. The researchers caution, however, that it’s too early for doctors to recommend that healthy people rush out and start taking the pain reliever for cancer prevention.
“This is strong evidence that there’s something going on with aspirin and cancer,” says biostatistician Nancy Cook at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Cook, who did not work on the studies, co-authored a related Lancet commentary published online with the reports on March 21, 2012.