IJE Advance Access published online on October 5, 2007
International Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/ije/dym204
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2007; all rights reserved.
Commentary: Preventing colorectal cancer with aspirin—what next?
Division of Epidemiology and Public Health, Queens Medical Centre, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2UH, UK.
E-mail: richard.logan@nottingham.ac.uk
Accepted 20 August 2007
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Aspirin was first synthesized in 1897 and marketed 2 years later by Bayer, at that time a small German dyestuffs manufacturer.1 It is a simple drug consisting of only a benzene ring with an acetyl group and a carboxylic acid group attached at positions 1 and 2 on the ring. Over the past 100 years aspirin has had enormous usage throughout the world currently equivalent to 100 billion standard aspirin tablets a year. One might have imagined therefore that all important effects of taking aspirin would now be well established. So it is salutary that 2007 should see a report from two large randomized trials establishing that regular aspirin use will halve the incidence of colorectal cancer albeit 10 years later.2 What lessons, if any, are there from how this remarkable discovery was made?
The epidemiological trail appears to start with the paper by Kune et al.3 reproduced in this