Post diagnosis aspirin improves survival in all gastrointestinal cancers

Aspirin improves survival in patients with tumors situated throughout the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, results from a large study in the Netherlands show, reports EurekAlert.

This is the first time that survival data from patients with tumors in different GI locations have been analyzed at the same time; previously, only one type of cancer, usually colorectal, was studied. The results of the study, involving nearly 14,000 patients, may lead to new insights regarding the use of aspirin in GI cancer say the researchers.

Presenting the results to the 2015 European Cancer Congress taking place in Vienna, Austria, the trial co-ordinator Martine Frouws, from Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands, described how her team analysed data from 13,715 patients who had been diagnosed with a GI cancer between 1998 and 2011. By linking the data to drug dispensing information from PHARMO, the Institute for Drug Outcomes Research based in Utrecht, the team was able to show an association between aspirin use after a cancer diagnosis and overall survival (OS); they found there was a significant increase in OS among patients who did take aspirin compared to those who did not.