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Aspirin May Fight Cancer by Halting Mutant DNA

The precocious Victorian-era pill proves useful for something else, again.
Barrett's mucosa, via AFIP

Your ever-present friend in times of hangover, aspirin, is a gift that just keeps on giving.

Already a painkiller that prevents heart attacks and strokes, researchers have found that aspirin might also fight cancer by slowing the accumulation of DNA mutations in abnormal cells.

Researchers hope to verify that aspirin’s anti-inflammatory properties can slow the rate of mutations before it evolves into cancer. UC San Francisco researchers found that in biopsy samples from patients with the precancerous condition called “Barrett’s Esophagus” that patients taking aspirin were developing mutations 10 times slower. Aspirin, researchers hope, could be an inexpensive and safe treatment to stop cancer before it even develops.

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It’d be yet another boon for the little pill that keeps on giving. Hippocrates, of “the oath,” fame, was prescribing the active ingredient in aspirin, salicylic acid, way back in 400 B.C.E, in the form of willow leaves and bark, to fight pain and fever. By 1828, German chemists were trying to balance salicylic acid’s forgotten and then rediscovered pain-reducing qualities with the fact that it’s a strong acid.

A chemist working for the company Friedr. Bayer & Co, Felix Hoffmann, produced acetylsalicylic acid that reduced the side-effects of salicylic acid through introducing an acetyl group to it. After a year of animal testing when they discovered their new drug increased heart performance, they called the medicine “Aspirin” and began marketing it in May 1899.

As part of reparations for World War I, the word “Aspirin” became the generic word for the drug in the victorious Allied countries of Britain, France and the US.

In 1974, aspirin was clinically proven to prevent heart attacks. In 1989 it was reported to help delay senile dementia, in 1995 it was found to help prevent bowel cancer.

There are very few treatments from the Victorian age that sound at all appetizing or even at all useful. It makes aspirin's ever-growing list of applications, here 114 years after it first came to market, that much more impressive.