Nation.co.ke: [2] Regular aspirin use reduces the risk of digestive tract cancer 20 to 40 per cent, according to findings published Thursday that bolster growing evidence the common analgesic can help prevent the disease.
[3] A review of 113 recent studies covering more than 210,000 patients showed that bowel cancer risk dropped 27 percent, oesophageal cancer by 33 percent, stomach cancer by 36 percent, and gastric cardia — where the stomach connects to the windpipe — cancer by 39 percent.
[4] For pancreatic cancer, which is almost always fatal, there was a nearly 25 percent reduced risk after five years among people who used aspirin compared to those who did not, researchers reported in Annals of Oncology. [5] “These findings suggest there’s a beneficial effect of aspirin in the prevention of bowel and other cancers of the digestive tract,” said senior author Carlos La Vecchia, a professor of epidemiology at the School of Medicine in Milan.

About 175,000 people die from bowel cancer in the European Union every year, about 100,000 of them between the age of 50 and 74.

“If we assume regular use of aspirin increases from 25 to 50 percent in this age group, this would mean 5,000 to 7,000 deaths from bowel cancer, and between 12,000 and 18,000 new cases, could be avoided,” La Vecchia said in a statement.