Aspirin Helps Slow Recurrence of Breast Cancer in Overweight Postmenopausal Women

 Intake of common anti-inflammatory drugs helps lower breast cancer recurrence rates in postmenopausal overweight patients.

The risk of breast cancer increases with age and nearly 80 percent of the cases occur in postmenopausal women. Body weight is risk factor of postmenopausal breast cancer. Studies conducted earlier have highlighted that obese postmenopausal women are more likely to develop breast cancer when compared to healthy women of same age.

In the new study, led by researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the University of Texas at Austin, found that aspirin and ibuprofen - the common anti-inflammatory drugs - helped reduce the recurrence of breast cancer in overweight postmenopausal patients.

To prove the hypothesis, the researchers collected blood serum from the Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CRTC) breast cancer patients and examined it. The serum was then placed in a culture of fat cells that make estrogen and then placed the serum on breast cancer cells. They noticed that the serum belonging to obese and overweight patients had triggered the cancer cells to grow in an aggressive manner when compared to the serum of patients who were not overweight.

"It looks like the mechanism is prostaglandins, which have a role in inflammation, and there's more of it in the obese patient serum," Dr. Brenner said.

Based on this, a retrospective study was conducted on patients from CTRC and START Center for Cancer Care. The patients were further separated into those taking COX2 inhibitors like aspirin or ibuprofen and those who did not.

"Patients who were on COX2 inhibitors tended to have a lower recurrence rate," Dr. Brenner said.

Anti-inflammatory drugs are used to lower the recurrence rate of ERα positive breast cancer by 50 percent and boosted their healthy life by more than two years.  "Overweight or obese women diagnosed with breast cancer are facing a worse prognosis than normal-weight women," said Cancer researcher Linda deGraffenried, who is also adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Cellular and Structural Biology at the Health Science Center.

In obese women the disease behaves differently; the changes occur at molecular level. The researchers want to lower the disease-promoting effects of obesity. They want to trace which women are more likely to benefit from interventions like adding NSAIDs to the treatment regimen.

The finding was documented in Cancer Research.