The latest anti-cancer bulletin out of Columbia University disseminated in the Journal of the American Medical Association testifies that aspirin has been ‘associated with a decrease in the risk of several cancers, including breast cancer’
Grandma Joyce, as she’s called by her six grandchildren, is a robust seventy. Recently, I caught up with her as she stood sweeping her driveway, carefully collecting the bits of loose gravel and bagging them for garbage disposal.
“Hi there,” she shouted across the leafy street, as I passed by, “have you heard the latest news?” she asked with a teenager’s excitement.
Good God, America has been attacked again! That being my reflexive thought, the brain conjured up all the breathless hype and hysteria of TV networks and attorney-general Ashcroft hyperventilating on Osama’s hoods hurting America real bad yet again. Joyce read my dark thoughts and quickly blurted out, “There’s good news for us post-menopausal women!”
Watch what you say, woman! You could give someone a mini heart attack ... I felt like flinging across from my side of the pavement. Times are a changing, not only in the cities, but in the lovely sleepy suburbia of America, where fear of heart failure or malignancy doesn’t rattle the retired folks as much as terrorism.
But the health freak that Joyce is, she likes to commandeer street meetings with her weather-beaten neighbours, all but few having attained the grand old age of superannuation. Her husband, Tom, is 78, and has bad knees. Recently, the couple sailed on a “golden voyage” that took them to the Bahamas and further on to the Panama Canal.
“It’s on the tip of their tongues,” she smiled naughtily, her hazel eyes cringing behind her glasses, “the researchers at Columbia University in New York are almost certain that women who take aspirin reduce their chances of getting breast cancer!” Ever since the big ‘C’ almost got Joyce, she has become a sworn aspirin consumer at the professional advice of her primary-care physician, who told her to take “one aspirin a day to keep cancer away.”
“I am already covered”, she said smugly while resting both her hands on the broom, hinting how vulnerable the rest of us were. Seymour, once a successful Madison Avenue advertising man, but now bent more with loneliness than age, hearing us talk, came bounding across from his bungalow (that’s what these single-storey homes built at the turn of the last century were once called). “I wish this discovery had arrived earlier — Ellen might have been alive today.”
Seymour lost his wife Ellen to breast cancer a couple of years ago.
This latest anti-cancer bulletin out of Columbia University has been disseminated in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), testifying that aspirin has “been associated with a decrease in the risk of several cancers, including breast cancer.”
According to the chief researcher Dr Mary Beth Terry and her colleagues, the data they have gathered thus far, “adds to the growing evidence that supports the regular use of aspirin and other NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) as effective chemopreventive agents for breast cancer.”
Sounds good to me, too, I mulled after reading the JAMA report, happy for once that my frequent intake of painkillers for the awful migraine attacks carried a tradeoff now that Columbia had declared aspirin as the protector-in-chief against breast cancer. After carefully reading the contents of my particular painkiller, I was somewhat disheartened to find that aspirin ruled supreme as opposed to ibuprofen (which I take), “the results for which were generally weaker.”
Other analgesics, particularly “acetaminophen” were found ineffective in the “reduction in the incidence of breast cancer.”
But before we begin to pop aspirin to ward off breast cancer, another wise old man, Tony Rinaldi, who lives down the street, shared his experience of taking aspirin daily. He has had two surgeries to remove a buildup of cholesterol — the gashes beginning from his neck downwards are still so fresh and look kind of intimidating (I had never heard of such a treatment before).
“My cardiologist put me on aspirin for blood thinning, but I suffered serious side-effects, even intestinal bleeding. I had to stop aspirin altogether.”
Considering that we all grew up on ‘Aspro’ as we call it in Pakistan, for fever, headache, bodyache or period pains, do you know the medical world at large, as late as 1971, was in the dark on how exactly did aspirin attack pain? Sounds weird! One bright spark finally figured it out. John Vane, a Brit, discovered that aspirin “worked by inhibiting the body’s production of a hormone-like substance called prostaglandin”, the main culprit that causes pain by “stimulating muscle contractions and blood vessel dilation.”
For his epiphany, Vane bagged the Nobel Prize in 1982, making the small white pill — a ragamuffin compared to the blue-blooded pills then in reign — a jewel crowning our medicine chests.
In 1985 came another award for aspirin when the sanctimonious US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved its use as a preventive for heart attacks in patients who “had either suffered a previous heart attack or suffered from unstable angina.” This decision was based on studies showing that aspirin reduced the risk of a second heart attack by 20 per cent and for patients suffering from unstable angina, the risk of a heart attack decreased by 51 per cent.
“Aspirin helps reduce the risk of heart attack by diminishing the clotting action of blood platelets.”
Now comes more fame and glory with the news that breast cancer can be kept at bay by this pill (scientists still have to determine its dosage). Declared one woman doctor effusively: “Many people are already taking low-dose aspirin to reduce the risk of heart disease and it would be really interesting if this drug which we take so much for granted could also reduce the risk of breast cancer.”
Samia al Qadhi, chief executive of Breast Cancer Care is however cagey: “We would like to stress caution to all women who are considering taking aspirin as a result of this study because aspirin can be associated with other health issues such as gastrointestinal problems,” saying that women must consult their doctors to discuss the benefits and risks. “We feel it is vital that more clinical research is undertaken to examine the effect of aspirin on breast cancer.”
It is a given that aspirin is not without side-effects — still doctors really don’t have enough clinical evidence to measure the negative effects it can produce in the long run. While aspirin may have come a long way since it first assumed a life, more than a century ago, the fact that it can still irritate the lining of the stomach similar to the incursions by its elder sister salicin since the age of Hippocrates, just proves how painfully slow the pharmaceutical process of discovery can be. Not to mention the flop around for a formula.
It was only two years ago that a coup against Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) took place in America, with excessive whimsy that women on HRT must chuck out their estrogen pills for the flotsam carried risks of heart attacks or strokes or even breast and ovarian malignancy!
When befuddled menopausal women, taking HRT for decades, rushed to ask their doctors, they invariably got a noncommittal response: “Take what you think works best for you!”
Ever heard of medical malpractice lawsuits? Well, its the scourge for doctors in America who pay thousands each year to buy safety insurance that protects them from being sued by their patients claiming millions in damages!
So your lily-livered doctor will never tell you exactly what to do. It’s your life, your choice, so you decide and bear the responsibility for your decision.
The latest anti-cancer bulletin out of Columbia University disseminated in the Journal of the American Medical Association testifies that aspirin has been ‘associated with a decrease in the risk of several cancers, including breast cancer’ 
