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Aspirin
and cancer risk: an update to 2001
C Bosetti1, S Gallus1, C La Vecchia1,2
1Istituto di Ricerche
Farmacologiche "Mario Negri", Via Eritrea 62, 20157 Milan, Italy.
2Istituto di Statistica Medica e Biometria, Università
degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy. Correspondence
to: C Bosetti. Fax: (+39) 02 3320 0231. E-mail: bosetti@marionegri.it.
Received 29 April 2002; accepted 17 June 2002.
Evidence of a protective
role of aspirin on the risk of colorectal and other common cancers has been
building up since the end of the 1980s.
There are now more than 15 epidemiological (case-control and cohort) studies
indicating that long-term use of aspirin is associated with a reduced risk of
colorectal cancer.
The overall relative risk (RR) estimate for regular aspirin users was 0.71
(95% confidence interval (CI) 0.66-0.77) from case-control studies, and 0.84
(95% CI 0.72-0.98) from cohort studies.
A recent meta-analysis reported a RR of breast cancer for aspirin use of 0.70
(95% CI 0.61-0.81) in case-control studies, and of 0.79 (95% CI 0.59-1.06) in
cohort studies.
Furthermore, various epidemiological studies have suggested that aspirin use
might have a favourable effect on ovarian cancer as well: the overall RR
estimate was 0.82 (95% CI 0.69-0.99), although the evidence is too limited to
permit firm conclusions.
Data are more scanty, though in the same direction,
for other neoplasms, including in particular stomach and oesophageal cancer.
Key words: Aspirin; epidemiology; neoplasm;
risk factors
Copyright © 2002 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
All rights reserved
Source:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=12457105
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