Daily aspirin and omega-3 may reduce cancer risk – Chappelle Pharmasave

The National Cancer Institute estimate that doctors will diagnose around 140,250 new casesof cancer of the colon and rectum in 2018 in the United States.

Colon cancer develops from polyps or abnormal growths of tissue within the colon. Many of these polyps are benign, but some can lead to cancerous tumors.

Doctors identify precancerous polyps through colonoscopies that allow them to detect visible abnormalities in the large bowel.

In a new clinical trial, dubbed the seAFOod Trial, specialists from the universities of Leeds, Nottingham, Bradford, and Newcastle in the United Kingdom, in collaboration with researchers from other institutions, made an intriguing find.

They wanted to see if widely available drugs, such as aspirin and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) — one of the key fatty acids contained by omega-3 — would reduce the number of precancerous bowel polyps in people at high risk of colon cancer.

The researchers’ findings appear in the prestigious journal The Lancet.

Aspirin and EPA therapy beneficial

The researchers recruited 709 participants via 53 hospitals across England. All the individuals were at high risk of colon cancer.

The team split the participants into four treatment groups. Of these, some were to receive an aspirin treatment only, others EPA only, the third group was to receive an aspirin and EPA combination, and the final group was to receive a placebo.

Those in the aspirin-only group took a 300 milligram aspirin tablet every day for a year. The participants in the EPA group took 2 grams of EPA in four capsules for the same period of time. This EPA dose was higher than the amount available in regular omega-3 supplements.