Wonder Drug

When I was a kid (I'm talking pre-teen years), I was terrified of dying due to one sort of fatal disease or another, and even more terrified of some of the treatments then available. In my terror, I fantasized that aspirin was a kind of magic drug that would either protect against or cure any disease known to man. As I grew older, a remnant of that fantasy persisted — persisted in sufficient force that in my early twenties I began taking aspirin regularly — two a day — as a non-specific prophylactic against...whatever. Many years later came the discovery that a mere 80mg dose of aspirin a day (the standard aspirin tablet dose is 325mg) was amazingly prophylactic against fatal coronary events. Today, there appeared this:

[P]atients who took aspirin regularly for a period of several years were 21 percent less likely decades later to die of solid tumor cancers....

[...]

As part of [a] new study, published online Monday in the [British medical] journal Lancet, researchers examined the cancer death rates of 25,570 patients who had participated in eight different randomized controlled trials of aspirin that ended up to 20 years earlier.

Participants who had been assigned to the aspirin arms of the studies were 20 percent less likely after 20 years to have died of solid tumor cancers than those who had been in the comparison group taking dummy pills during the clinical trials, and their risk of gastrointestinal cancer death was 35 percent lower. The risk of lung cancer death was 30 percent lower, the risk of colorectal cancer death was 40 percent lower and the risk of esophageal cancer death was 60 percent lower, the study reported.

I'm not in the least surprised. I've known that for decades.

RTWT here.