A large cohort study of long-term daily use of adult-strength aspirin and cancer incidence. J Natl Cancer Inst. 2007;99:608-615.

Daily aspirin use has long been recommended as a preventative measure for adults at risk for stroke and/or heart disease. Now, the latest cancer research suggests that taking larger, adult doses (325 mg or more) of aspirin on a daily basis may lower the risk for several types of cancer in men and women.

Past studies on this topic could not provide conclusive results because they did not use randomized, controlled studies. Additionally, none of these studies used the adult dose of aspirin or had long-term durations.

This recent examination, however, lasted from 1992 to 2003, and utilized the adult dose of aspirin to compare cancer rates in over 70,000 men and over 76,000 women.

The findings showed an overall cancer rate reduction of 15% in people who took daily the adult dose of aspirin for 5 years or more, compared to people who took no aspirin at all.

Although these findings are very promising, researchers are cautious, saying that many of these results could have been due to chance. More large-scale, long-term studies must be conducted to determine aspirin's true potential to prevent cancer.