A pill of aspirin a day can protect a woman from breast cancer.
At least so say scientists from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, who studied the effect of low doses of aspirin on cancer cells in laboratory mice.
Sushanta Banerjee, a researcher at the Cancer Research Department of the VA Medical Center, published her results in the journal Investigation Investigation.
The authors believe that the regular intake of aspirin (a drug that is used to prevent thrombosis) can not only prevent the development of the disease, but also prevents the recurrence of cancer in cancer patients after surgery.
If you do not take skin cancer into account, then breast cancer is the most common cancer on American women. In 2015, according to the forecast of the US Central Clinical Hospital, about 230,000 cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed in this country, and not less than 40,000 women will die from it.
In the scientific world, not for the first time appears information about the anti-cancer properties of aspirin.
In July 2014, the pages of Medical News Today reported that regular intake of aspirin reduces the likelihood of cancer of the large intestine in women. In the same year, scientists from the University of Texas at Austin found that regular intake of aspirin is associated with a reduced risk of recurrence of breast cancer in women with overweight and obesity.
For her recent work, Dr. Banerjee and her team used cell cultures and animal models.
To begin with, scientists have grown human breast cancer cells in 96 individual Petri dishes, exposing them to acetylsalicylic acid at various concentrations. It turned out that aspirin has a detrimental effect on cancer cells even in insignificant concentrations, depriving them of the ability to multiply.
After this, scientists moved to experiments on rodents. They for 15 days gave aspirin to mice with aggressive breast cancer (the dose was equivalent to 75 mg / day for humans). At the end of the experiment, scientists compared the size of tumors with a control group: it turned out that taking aspirin resulted in a 47%. Of course, a two-week course of aspirin can not cure a person, but such unexpected results deserve attention.
In the next experiment, the scientists gave aspirin for a group of healthy mice for 10 days, after which they injected them with breast cancer cells. In such mice, tumors proliferated much more slowly compared to the control group. Dr. Banerjee says that aspirin blocked the mechanisms of reproduction of cancer cells.
"There is a great potential here.
We can give aspirin after cancer chemotherapy to prevent recurrence of the disease and continue this tactic for a long time because acetylsalicylic acid has demonstrated high efficacy in vitro and in vivo. Our results look promising, but we should beware of the classic side effects of aspirin, such as gastrointestinal bleeding. Still, I believe that the benefits of taking aspirin to prevent cancer recurrence outweigh the potential risk, "Banerjee said..
medbe. en.