New Guidelines Endorse Daily Aspirin, Without a Doubt

By John Henry Dreyfuss, MDalert.com staff.

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New Draft Guidelines

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recently released draft recommendations supporting the use of aspirin to help prevent disease. The list of diseases that cancer is shown by strong data to prevent continues to grow. The USPSTF now includes prevention of both cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer. The inclusion of colorectal cancer as part of these guidelines is a first.

The guidelines are still in draft form and will be released in a final version in 2016. The time has come to recommend daily low-dose aspirin to nearly every patient.

 

Figure 1. A stick-and-ball model of aspirin.

 

Preponderance of Evidence

As of the USPSTF draft recommendations, an enormous number of studies and professional guidelines have accumulated around the recommendation of daily aspirin for all patients. Among them:

Figure 2. Aspirin synthesis.
 

“There is now definitive evidence that long-term daily aspirin use, even at low doses, will lower risk of developing colorectal cancer, probably by approximately 40%,” Eric J. Jacobs, PhD, said in an interview with Cancer Prevention Research News, a publication of the American Cancer Society (ACS). Dr. Jacobs is a researcher with the ACS.

“Besides colorectal cancer, there is good evidence that aspirin use lowers the risk of developing cancer of the esophagus, and fairly good evidence that aspirin use also lowers the risk of developing stomach cancer. These two cancers are not among the most common in the U.S., but they are of some importance because they tend to be very hard to treat,” Dr. Jacobs explained.


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