Aspirin a Day Tied to Lower Cancer Mortality
By Nancy Walsh, Staff Writer, MedPage Today, Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Dorothy Caputo, MA, BSN, RN, Nurse Planner.
Daily aspirin use is associated with a modest decrease in mortality from cancer, particularly for malignancies of the gastrointestinal tract, a large retrospective study confirmed.
Individuals who were current daily users for 5 years or more at baseline had an 8% decrease in cancer mortality compared with non-users (RR 0.92, 95% CI 0.83 to 1.02), according to Eric J. Jacobs, PhD, and colleagues from the American Cancer Society in Atlanta. [Read more…]
Bold Surgery Needed in Mutant Astrocytomas – Brain Cancer
CHICAGO – Patients diagnosed with a mutant type of astrocytic glioma should have aggressive surgery to resect as much tumor as possible because these individuals may be able to achieve long-term survival, researchers said here.
In patients identified with the IDH1-mutation and who had less than 2 cc of residual tumor, survival was greater than 95% over nearly 17 years, compared with a survival of 20% among patients with a larger residual tumor (P=0.01), said Daniel Cahill, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Harvard.
“This is personalized surgery for these patients,” Cahill told MedPage Today at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. [Read more…]