The "magic drug" aspirin has added new effects; it may be able to treat biliary tract cancer!

If there is a magic drug in the world, it must be aspirin.

Aspirin was first discovered and listed on the market by Bayer in 1898.

This medicine, originally extracted from willow bark, gradually became famous and became the mainstay of the family medicine cabinet.

In the hands of several generations, it has successfully treated many diseases, such as arthritis and fever.

Sometimes people will use it as a preventive medicine to prevent strokes and heart attacks, or try to use it to prevent specific types of cancer.

This medicine is so popular that about 120 billion aspirin tablets are sold every year around the world.

In recent years, scientists have discovered that aspirin may have another purpose: to prevent cancer cells from spreading in the body at the beginning of tumor formation.

The specific research is still in the laboratory stage, but there is already some evidence that: maybe one day, aspirin will play a strong auxiliary role in existing cancer treatments.

So, for biliary tract cancer (BTC), which has a very poor treatment effect, can the magic drug be able to exert its power again? Biliary tract cancer (BTC), including cholangiocarcinoma and gallbladder cancer, is the second most common hepatobiliary tract cancer in the world.

Among them, Vater ampulla carcinoma is a special type.

Approximately 70% of BTC patients are already at an advanced stage at the time of diagnosis.

BTC patients often have limited treatment options and are very likely to develop resistance to treatment, so the 5-year survival rate is less than 20%.

To this end, the Institute of Clinical Medicine of National Yangming University in Taiwan has carried out related research to study the effect of aspirin use on the cancer-specific survival rate of various BTC subtypes, including gallbladder cancer, Vater ampullary cancer and bile duct.
Cell carcinoma.

The results were published in the latest Hepatology journal.

The researchers conducted a Taiwan-wide prospective cohort of newly diagnosed BTC from 2007 to 2015 and followed up until December 31, 2017.

Three Taiwan-wide databases, namely cancer registration, national health insurance and death certificate system, are used for computerized data linking.

The maximum defined daily dose (DDD) of aspirin use was used to assess the dose-response relationship, and the competitive risk of cardiovascular death was considered in the analysis.

A total of 2519 BTC patients used aspirin after diagnosis (15.
7%).

After an average follow-up of 1.
59 years, the 5-year survival rate for all participants was 27.
4%.

Compared with those who did not use aspirin, those who used aspirin after diagnosis had a 45% reduction in the risk of BTC-specific death (HR=0.
55, 95%CI: 0.
51-0.
58).

Among them, the use of aspirin showed a dose-response trend.

For maximum DDD ≤1 and >1, the risk of BTC-specific death was reduced by 47% and 58%, respectively (HR 0.
53, 95% CI: 0.
48-0.
59; 0.
42, 95% CI: 0.
31-0.
58).

Further analysis found that in patients with all major BTC subtypes, the use of aspirin after diagnosis had a lower cancer-specific mortality rate.

In summary, the study shows that the use of aspirin after the diagnosis of BTC is related to the improvement of different subtypes of BTC-specific mortality.

In the future, additional randomized trials are needed to study the efficacy of aspirin on BTC.

 Reference: Postdiagnosis aspirin use associated with decreased biliary tract cancer–specific mortality in a large nationwide cohort.
https://doi.
org/10.
1002/hep.
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