More About Aspirin the Wonder Drug

Aspirin is an inexpensive preventive medicine, as a daily low dose aspirin costs just pennies. Also known as acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin is a salicylate drug, often used as an analgesic to relieve minor aches and pains, as an antipyretic to reduce fever, and as an anti-inflammatory medication. Plant extracts including willow bark and spiraea, of which salicylic acid was the active ingredient, had been known to help heal headaches, pains and fevers since antiquity.
Aspirin has been creating a buzz in the news of late. Researchers in the UK recently published the results of clinical trials regarding aspirin use in the British medical journal, The Lancet.
While it has been known for some time that daily use of low dose aspirin lowers the risk of death from heart attacks, the new research suggests that daily use of aspirin reduces cancer deaths as well.
Among the 25,570 patients participated in trials lasting between four and eight years, those patients who took aspirin were 21% less likely to die of cancer than those who were given a placebo.
The studies included long-term follow-ups of the patients after five and twenty years, which showed consistent trends. After five years, death rates for all cancers fell by 35% and for gastrointestinal cancers by 54%. A long-term follow-up of patients showed that the 20-year risk of cancer death remained 20% lower in those who had taken aspirin.
For more on this research, see Prevention of Cancer: Wonder Drug