HEALTH, FOOD, NUTRITION, and SUPPLEMENTS

[SPARK]

A little aspirin may prevent bowel cancer

A LITTLE aspirin might just go as far as a lot when it comes to preventing bowel cancer - with fewer side effects.

So says a five-year retrospective study led by Malcolm Dunlop of the University of Edinburgh, UK, that compared the aspirin habits of 2800 people with cancer and 3000 without. The team found that the risk of getting cancer was 25 per cent lower in those who had been taking 75 milligrams of the drug daily compared with those who had not (Gut, DOI: 10.1136/gut.2009.203000).

If everyone in the UK was taking a low dose of aspirin in 2007, the latest year for which data on bowel cancer incidence data is available, it would have prevented 16 cases per 100,000.

This small reduction in risk is comparable to that from earlier studies in which the doses were much higher. Andrew Chan of Harvard Medical School in Boston is not convinced: "I still believe that lower doses are not as effective as higher ones." His 20-year follow-ups on 80,000 women and 50,000 men showed that daily doses of 325 milligrams worked best for preventing bowel cancer.