Results from a study in The Netherlands involving 13,715 patients showed that aspirin use after a cancer diagnosis significantly improved overall survival in patients diagnosed with a gastrointestinal cancer. In total, 30.5% of patients used aspirin pre-diagnosis, 8.3% were solely post-diagnosis users, and 61.1% had not taken aspirin at all. The commonest sites for tumours were colon (42.8% of patients), rectum (25.4%), and oesophagus (10.2%). Median follow-up time for all patients was 48.6 months, with 28% of patients surviving for at least five years. Patients using aspirin after their diagnosis had a chance of survival twice as high than that of those who did not use it in the same circumstances.
Presented at the European Cancer Conference (ECC) 2015 by Martine Frouws, MD, of Leiden University Medical Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands.
