Colorectal cancer, how does aspirin help prevent the development and progression of this disease? | Health | Magazine

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Long-term daily use of aspirin may help prevent the development and progression of colorectal cancer, although the mechanisms involved are still unclear. Research has revealed that aspirin may exert protective effects by stimulating certain aspects of the body’s immune response against cancer cells.

To investigate the effects of aspirin (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug) on ​​colorectal cancer, researchers in Italy obtained tissue samples from 238 patients who underwent surgery for colorectal cancer between 2015 and 2019.

12% of them were aspirin users. And compared to tissue samples from patients who did not use aspirin, the former showed less spread of cancer to lymph nodes and greater infiltration of immune cells into tumors.

In laboratory analyses, exposing cells to aspirin caused increased expression of a protein called CD80 on certain immune cells, which improved the cells’ ability to alert other immune cells to the presence of tumor-associated proteins.

In support of this finding, the researchers found that in patients with rectal cancer, aspirin users had higher CD80 expression in healthy rectal tissue, suggesting a proimmune surveillance effect of aspirin.

“Our study shows a complementary mechanism of cancer prevention or therapy with aspirin, in addition to its classic pharmacological mechanism involving inhibition of inflammation,” said lead researcher Marco Scarpa, MD, PhD, of the University of Padua.

“Aspirin is absorbed in the colon by passive diffusion to a significant degree. Its absorption is linear and depends on the concentration throughout the intestine and in the rectum, the concentration of aspirin administered orally can be much lower than in the rest of the colon.

What to do if you want to take advantage of the effects of aspirin against colorectal cancer? “(Doctors) should think about how to ensure that aspirin reaches the colorectal tract in adequate doses to be effective,” Dr. Scarpa explained.

These data suggested that regular aspirin use may have an active role in improving immunosurveillance against colorectal cancer.

The study was funded by the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC) and was mainly carried out at the University Hospital of Padua. Patients were enrolled in the Metaccre section of the Immune Microenvironment in the Multicenter Observational Study Rectal Adenocarcinoma Treatment (IMMUNOREACT 8).

The findings were published in Ccancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.

Source: Ottavia De Simoni, Melania Scarpa, Ignazio Castagliuolo, Astghik Stepanyan and others in the Journal of the American Cancer Society, published April 22, 2024. IMMUNOREACT 7: Regular aspirin use is associated with immune surveillance activation in colorectal cancer