Aspirin benefits heart attack cancer patients

Researchers at the USA-based University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center say that cancer patients who frequently suffer heart attacks are likely to die without receiving aspirin, a comman non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug thought to cause leathal bleeding. Jean-Bernard Durand, the lead author of the study, which is to be published in the February 1 issue of the journal Cancer, hopes the findings will turn common medical assumptions upside down and change standard medical practice for cancer patients.

Because aspirin can thin blood and cancer patients experience low platelet counts and abnormal clotting, physicians view aspirin as a relative contraindication. Given that blood platelets are responsible for the clotting process, physicians do not eagerly prescribe aspirin as a standard treatment. In this study, however, the investigators found that nine of 10 cancer patients with thrombocytopenia (low platelet count) who were experiencing a heart attack and who did not receive aspirin died, whereas only one patient died in a group of 17 similar cancer patients who received aspirin. They also found aspirin helps cancer patients with normal platelet count survive heart attacks, just as it does for people without cancer.

Prof Durand said: "we believe tumors may be releasing chemicals that allow the cancer to form new blood supplies which makes blood more susceptible to forming clots. There appears to be a platelet paradox suggesting that cancer may affect the mechanism of the way that blood clots, and from this analysis, we have found that the single most important predictor of survival in these patients is whether or not they received aspirin."