Professor Karol Sikora’s highly erudite feature, “Is Aspirin Really a Magic Bullet for Cancer?” in the Daily Telegraph answers most of the questions raised by the aspirin debate.
The former Chief of WHO Cancer gets to the nub by explaining the importance of the new sophisticated diagnostic tests that can evaluate any individual’s risk and how prevention strategies, if anything, are the real ‘magic bullets’.
Yes, Prof Sikora agrees with the evidence for aspirin and he describes how the anti-inflammatory role of not just aspirin, but a wide range of similar drugs can act to help prevent the blocking of natural immune surveillance as well as associated blood vessel growth (angiogenesis) – essential for cancer survival. But, he makes a number of far bigger points, namely:
- Prevention is better than cure and up to 140,000 lives could be saved in the UK by effective use of existing knowledge.
- Identifying high risk individuals and giving tailored advice / treatments is the future of cancer care.
- The commercial approach to producing ‘block buster drugs’ that actually save relatively few lives (in comparison to the effectiveness of prevention) is where all the investment in health currently goes.
- It’s important to do sensible things that make you feel better, regardless of the evidence.
- Preventative medical strategies need to be patient friendly in order to ‘buy-in’ patient compliance.
As Prof Sikora says: “Individualisation of risk, biomarkers of risk and effective tailored prevention will be the future of cancer care”.