The Foundation is going strong; it’s a scientifically based organisation dispensing information with its own website and providing data to the media, to the public and to scientists who are interested in the ever-broadening use of aspirin in medical problems.
Could you talk about the history of the Aspirin Foundation meeting?
We’ve had international meetings all over the place, we’ve had about fifteen now, and we have leading scientists from all over the world who come to tell us their latest findings or their latest research project because aspirin has now got so big as a research tool that it’s like the old antibiotics which used to be called broad-spectrum. Aspirin is the new broad-spectrum medicine being used now in cardiovascular disease; being used in cancer and a broadening use in cancer, a lot of new work is going on in that area; dementia, to prevent dementia growing; in diabetes, the side effects of that. And, as we shall hear today at this meeting from Professor Graham Hughes, known for the Hughes Syndrome, one of the few men with a syndrome named after him who is still alive, and this is the syndrome in lupus where ladies miscarry early in pregnancy and it’s thought to be due to blockages in the placental blood system which starves the baby, the growing foetus, and therefore the foetus is aborted. Aspirin prevents the development of those clots in the placental vessels and the people go to full term and have a baby.
What are some of the effects of aspirin specifically in cancer?
We don’t yet know the precise mechanism of action of aspirin in cancer. We think it may be on the platelets in the bloodstream because it does prevent platelets from clumping together to form clots which is why it’s effective in heart attacks and stroke, occlusive stroke. But the other effects are on chemical mechanisms within the platelet and the bloodstream called cyclooxygenase, and it’s that area that is being looked at very seriously to see if that’s a factor in the cancer prevention work. Most importantly, it’s not only the immediate cancer, the first diagnosis cancer, but it’s also the spread or metastasis. This is the best news, that people diagnosed with a cancer who are taking aspirin and continue to take aspirin, there’s a much, much lower risk of metastases, i.e. of spread of that cancer.
Have recent discoveries resulted in further examination of aspirin?
Yes, it very often happens in medicine. You’ll observe an effect and then you have to find out how it happens. Aspirin is probably the oldest medicine in the world; it’s based on a natural substance found in many vegetables and fruits, which is salicylate, and when trees and plants are damaged they use salicylate to heal themselves. Now, in 400BC Hippocrates, the father of medicine, was giving a brew of willow leaves to his patients on the island of Cos to relieve the pain of childbirth. He didn’t know why it worked but he knew it did work and he was the father of medicine and also, in fact, the father of aspirin.
