Aspirin could cut risk of death in cancer patients by 20% | Hacker News Reader

Aspirin could cut risk of death in cancer patients by 20%

ecancer.org

92 pointsWaitWaitWha36 comments

This is likely good news, but it’s important to understand context.

In yet another case of optimizing for a metric, 5 year cancer survivor rate used to roughly equate to a cure. However, as more people are living longer in treatment with cancer, many things that only slightly slow death can look awesome while only adding a few months on average.

For something as cheap and side effect free as Aspirin it’s likely an obvious choice. Just don’t except long term survival odds to improve as much as suggested.

Aspirin binds to PPARα to stimulate hippocampal plasticity and protect memory [1] Low-Dose Aspirin Upregulates Tyrosine Hydroxylase and Increases Dopamine Production in Dopaminergic Neurons: Implications for Parkinson’s Disease [2]

[1] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1802021115 [2] https://doi.org/10.1007/s11481-018-9808-3

Aspirin does prevent blood clots, right? Tumors are known to produce blood clots, maybe avoiding them improves the chances of survival.

ASpirin targets many different things.

It should also be trialed against Triflusal, which an COX-1 irreversible inhibitor that is safer in some circumstances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triflusal

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4931664/

I have been taking baby aspirin since I had a colon cancer scare after my doctor advised me to. After a lot of literature reading, daily low dose aspirin therapy seems to be a good way to take care of your health.

If you can reduce inflammation systematically through numerous holistic means, you probably are going to live longer and better.

My intuition says that excessive inflammation, mechanical wear, or other repeated injuries at any scale are cancer/death fuel.

What sort of "colon cancer scare" resulted in you taking baby aspirin?

Mesalazine aka 5-ASA is an medication used to treat ulcerative colitis, crohn's and co. It's molecule is very similar to Aspirin. In fact, mesalazine is basically a localised form of aspirin for the gut. That's the logic I see in my head

Some doctors refer to salicylic acid as "vitamin S" because of its myriad of positive health effects.

I take 100mg almost daily myself, but some studies say that for people without a prior stroke, myocardial infarction or Angina pectoris it can even be harmful. [1][2]

According to most general physicians here in Germany I shouldn't be taking it as a person without said medical history.

I don't plan to continue taking daily Asprin when I have met my weight loss and exercise goals.

This new evidence for benefits with cancer patients is very interesting.

Studies like that are hard to judge as a layman, meta-studies even more so.

[2] found:

> Cancer was the major contributor to the higher mortality in the aspirin group, accounting for 1.6 excess deaths per 1000 person-years. Cancer-related death occurred in 3.1% of the participants in the aspirin group and in 2.3% of those in the placebo group

In addition there's the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1803955

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221317791...

The caveat for this is if some of your primary health risks are bleeding related, at which point it's counter-productive in many cases.

Risk of death always 100%.

Risk of death eventually 100%.

In cancer care by convention they look at 5 year survival rates.

I know. The headline is still wrong. Aspirin may improve one’s chance of living more than five years with cancer. Everyone will die, with or without cancer, with or without aspirin.

Probability of death of an individual is on average 100%.

Edit: honestly, how autistic can one be to vote this down? lol

probability of death of an individual is under 100%, as not everyone is dead yet.

What kind of cake?

Risk (a chance of an adverse event) of death always approaches 100% given enough time. Eventually the set of all possible events that can happen to you is smaller and smaller, and proportionally more of the probability space is occupied by events that lead to your death.

Who said anything about adverse?

Every person alive will die, 100% chance.

I understand the point of the article and the hundreds of other like it proclaiming coffee or red wine or friends reduce the “risk of death.” They mean to say reduces the number of test subjects who died during the study period. Nothing reduces the risk, though. We all die.

Next week’s headline: Aspirin raises cancer risk by 20%

I thought I was joking…

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/a-low-dose-aspirin-da...

This is a perfect example of why our current media feels so exhausting. There's so many conflicting viewpoints and studies that all seem reasonable.

With a low enough sample size anything can be true.

It's exhausting because the stories exaggerate the findings. Most everything in science is nuanced. Small sample, preliminary finding, caveats, unclear results…

Really, this is more of an issue with modern storytelling which is often motivated to be sensational, or at least to present a relatable story.

Or in this case a meta study. It's hard to say how meaningful the results are because the purposes and methods of the underlying studies, meaning it's not likely they were designed to control for other factors that would impact what this study was looking at.

0.8*1.2 = 0.96, so that's a net 4% decrease in deaths :)

Cancer causes cell phones, by xkcd

https://xkcd.com/925/

Correlation != Causation :)

They do have a noticeable impact on sperm count though. That's enough of a reason not to have one, or at least not carry it in one's pockets.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4074720/

If this is significant, then maybe one should refrain from keeping a phone near testicles for a month or two before using those testicles for procreation. Otherwise, not terribly relevant to behavior.

https://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/

Your username is fitting in relation to the title ;-)

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