Can Aspirin and Cancer Prevention be Ageless Companions?

摘要

Over the past few decades, the rate of cancer diagnosis has increased worldwide due to the increase in population and average lifeexpectancy, and also, due to the advances in diagnostic medical technology that facilitate early cancer detection and recognition.Nonetheless, the treatment options have not been developed proportional to this increase, with a huge number of patients frequentlybeing diagnosed with different types of fatal cancer. This has prompted different health organizations to search for novel strategies toprevent cancer, or even halt its progression. Having failed to provide optimum vascular protection benefits, especially with the introductionof relatively superior antiplatelets, such as adenosine diphosphate (ADP) receptor inhibitors; clopidogrel and ticagrelor, regular aspirin usewas proposed to reduce the risk of common cancers like colorectal cancer, gastric cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancerand haematological malignancies, as suggested by epidemiological studies. However, it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions on suchweak data, as this could raise false hopes among patients and physicians and could potentially mislead scientific research. Clearly,current evidence highlights a gap in medical research and emphasizes the need to carry out interventional studies in high risk for cancerpatients using specific aspirin doses in order to validate the data. This should also shed some light on the risk-benefit profile in view ofthe potential for bleeding complications, especially with the higher doses.