Aspirin linked to lower risk of lung cancer

Best Health News, 2012

People who take aspirin regularly are half as likely to have lung cancer as people who don’t, a new study shows.
Previous studies have shown that people who regularly take aspirin have a lower risk of some cancers, including bowel and prostate cancers.
We’re still not sure how long you would have to take aspirin and how regularly you would have to take it in order to have any benefit in terms of preventing cancer.
And taking aspirin regularly can cause dangerous side effects like ulcers and bleeding in the stomach.
This means it's unclear whether the benefits in preventing cancer would outweigh the risks of side effects.
This latest study looked for a link between regularly taking aspirin and the risk of lung cancer.
The researchers looked at two groups of people - 398 people who took aspirin regularly (twice a week or more, for a month or more) and 640 in a control group who had been in hospital but did not take aspirin.
They then compared the two groups to see if more people in either group had lung cancer than would be expected by chance.
Compared to people who never took aspirin, people who took aspirin regularly had a reduced risk of lung cancer.
People who took aspirin regularly and who had never smoked were 50 percent less likely to have lung cancer than those who didn’t take aspirin.
People who took aspirin regularly and who smoked were 62 percent less likely to have lung cancer than people who smoked but didn’t take aspirin.