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Researchers ponder aspirin's potential in preventing cancer.

Areview article published online August 5 might leave some readers wondering whether it’s time to start adding aspirin to the drinking water. The article, written by a team of US and European scientists, concludes that the benefits of daily, long-term aspirin use outweigh the potential harms—namely gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding and hemorrhagic stroke—for a large swath of the middleaged population (Cuzick J et al. Ann Oncol. doi:10.1093/annonc/mdu225 [published online August 5, 2014]). While it’s no surprise that aspirin can protect against cardiovascular events, the drug’s added value is that it appears to reduce the risk of a variety of cancers, according to the report. “For average-risk individuals aged 50 to 65 years taking aspirin for 10 years, there would be a relative reduction of between 7% (women) and 9% (men) in the number of cancer, myocardial infarction, or stroke events over a 15-year period and an overall 4% relative reduction in all deaths over a 20-year period,” the researchers wrote. “Prophylactic aspirin use for a minimum of 5 years at doses between 75 and 325 mg/day appears to have favorable benefit-harm profile; longer use is likely to have greater benefits.” The authors agreed that the evidence suggests aspirin protects against colorectal, esophageal, and stomach cancer, and all but 3 of 15 authors felt that reductions in breast, prostate, and lung cancer also were significant enough to include among the drug’s benefits. No practice guidelines currently recommend taking aspirin for primary prevention of cancer, although the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is in the process of updating and broadening its recommendation on that topic (http://bit.ly/1q35QPc). (In 2007, the USPSTF advised against using aspirin and other nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs to prevent colorectal cancer, the cancer for which there is the