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medpundit |
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Sunday, January 11, 2004Aspirin's reputation as a wonder drug could be dented by recent US research suggesting that long-term use might increase the risk of pancreatic cancer. A study found that women who took two or more 325mg aspirin tablets a week for more than 20 years were 56% more likely to develop the disease than those who took lower doses less often. Heavy users, taking 14 or more tablets a week, were 86% more likely to contract the often fatal condition. The results, based on a study of aspirin use by 88,378 women nurses and reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, run counter to much promising research about the drug. That's bad news. Pancreatic cancer is a very bad cancer. It's invariably fatal. It's also very rare - which means ample room for error in statistical manipulations of the sort used by the study. (Link doesn't work. Go here, scroll down to reference #1 and click on "Free Full Text.". This will take you to the abstract. Click on "Full Text" and you should be able to access it for free.): Among 88,378 women without cancer at baseline, we documented 161 cases of pancreatic cancer during 18 years of follow-up. That's an incidence of 0.002%. To make up for those small numbers, the authors had to resort to expressing their results in terms of person years, rather than giving us the number of people in each of their aspirin use categories. They also chose to express their results only in terms of "relative risk" further inflating their numbers. The number of cases in each category are very small. The true incidence is impossible to determine from the given data. And yet, one of the lead authors felt compelled to make this statement to The Guardian: But Eva Schernhammer, the leader of the research team from Harvard medical school in Boston, advised against prolonged use of aspirin. The report said: "Our findings do not support a protective effect of analgesic use after extended periods of use. Risks and benefits associated with the use of aspirin have to be weighed carefully in any recommendations made by health care professionals. Of course risks and benefits have to be weighed before using any drug, including aspirin, but the risk of pancreatic cancer pales in comparison to the risk of heart disease or stroke, both of which regular aspirin use, in doses less than those examined in the study, can reduce. An aspirin a day still keeps the doctor away. posted by Sydney on 1/11/2004 01:11:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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