Later On

Very interesting article about anti-inflammatories and cancer. As readers know, I have for years taken 1/2 tsp turmeric in my morning hot cereal, after reading a note about its anti-inflammatory action and the effects of that. You can readily Google and find information on tumeric—here’s an article that lists 20 health benefits.

The article that prompted this post is by Giorgio Trinchieri and begins:

What if taking aspirin could reduce your risk of cancer? Researchers have debated the relationship between inflammation and cancer for many years, but recent studies have reignited the discussion with evidence that taking aspirin daily for 5 years or longer can protect against death from colorectal and other solid cancers. If this observation indeed holds true, and aspirin can stave off cancer or reduce the risk of recurrence, this familiar, age-old drug could offer a tantalizingly simple treatment.

Unfortunately, aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are not without problematic side effects, increasing the risks of liver toxicity and bleeding in the stomach and brain when taken over extended periods of time. Researchers who have been studying the molecular pathways at the intersection of cancer and inflammation hope their findings may lead to more selective ways of reducing inflammation, eliminating or minimizing aspirin’s negative effects without sacrificing its benefits.When Peter Rothwell at John Radcliffe Hospital in Headington, Oxfordshire, and colleagues analyzed individual patient data from eight randomized trials in which patients took a daily aspirin for prevention of cardiovascular diseases, they noticed the aspirin takers had a lower incidence of death from cancer than those who didn’t take the drug.¹ Earlier studies had shown that daily use of aspirin and other NSAIDs over extended periods reduced the risk of colorectal cancer or polyp recurrence, but no clear evidence was previously available, at least in humans, that aspirin might also reduce the risk of other cancers. In the new study, the benefit of aspirin use was apparent after at least five years of treatment. In trials in which the patients had been taking aspirin for more than 7.5 years, the 20-year risk of cancer death (from the initiation of the trials) was reduced by approximately 30 percent for all solid cancers and by 60 percent for gastrointestinal cancers. For lung and esophageal cancer, the benefit was confined to subtypes of those cancers that originated in glandular tissue (adenocarcinomas). For colorectal cancer, the effect was high for cancer in the proximal colon but not in the distal colon.

These data clearly point to the importance of anti-inflammatory drugs in preventing the initiation and progression of both gastrointestinal and other solid organ cancers (including lung and prostate), and suggest that inflammation may be an underlying cause of cancer even in tumor types that had not been traditionally thought to originate within chronically inflamed tissues.

Inflammation and cancer genes

Although the role of inflammation in favoring carcinogenesis has generated much interest in the last 10–15 years, the Greek physician Claudius Galenus observed some similarity between cancer and inflammation almost 2 thousand years ago. Galenus originally used Hippocrates’s term “cancer” specifically to describe certain inflammatory tumors of the breast in which superficial veins appeared swollen and radiated, somewhat like the claws of a crab. Later the name was extended to include all malignant and infiltrating growths. In 1863 Rudolf Virchow noted white blood cells or leukocytes in neoplastic tissues and made a connection between inflammation and cancer. He suggested that the “lymphoreticular infiltrate” reflected the origin of cancer at sites of chronic inflammation. A seminal observation was made more than a century later, when Harold Dvorak of Harvard University noted that inflammation and cancer share some basic developmental mechanisms (angiogenesis) and tissue-infiltrating cells (lymphocytes, macrophages, and mast cells), and that tumors act like “wounds that do not heal.”

Researchers hope to find more selective ways of eliminating or minimizing aspirin’s negative effects without sacrificing its benefits.

Chronic inflammation can affect all phases of carcinogenesis, from favoring the initial genetic alterations that drive cancer formation, to acting as a tumor promoter by establishing conditions in the surrounding tissues that allow the tumor to progress and metastasize, and even triggering immunosuppressive mechanisms that prevent an effective immune response against the tumors.

In 2004 Robert Bass Jr. at the The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and colleagues showed for the first time that . . .

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