Aspirin Helps Cancer/Heart Patients
Posted on: Tuesday, 23 January 2007, 00:00 CST
More cancer patients who have a heart attack survive when they receive aspirin, say U.S. researchers.
Jean-Bernard Durand and his colleagues at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., noted that cancer patients having heart attacks were rarely given aspirin because their blood clotting factors (platelet counts) were already low from chemotherapy and physicians feared that aspirin, which is a blood thinner, would start a dangerous bleeding episode.
The team believed that tumors release chemicals to stimulate the formation of new blood vessels so they can grow, and these chemicals thicken the blood in spite of low platelet counts and create clots that cause heart attacks.
To test their theory they studied the records of 70 cancer patients having heart attacks at M.D. Anderson in 2001 and discovered that only 6 percent of those with low platelet counts survived a heart attack if they did not receive aspirin, but if they were given the drug, 90 percent lived. Patients who received aspirin suffered no severe bleeding complications.
Now that we have this study, it would be a travesty if you survive treatment for cancer only to die of a heart attack soon thereafter, said Durand.
A report on the research appears in the advance online issue of the February 1 edition of the journal Cancer.
Source: United Press International
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