The Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH) is all set to start a 10-year long pan India clinical study in a month's time to determine the efficacy of Aspirin in preventing the risk of cancer relapses.

The study titled “Add- Aspirin” is a joint initiative of TMH and the UK-based Medical Research Council involving 60 Indian investigators and 300 investigators from the UK. TMH recently received clinical trial approval from Ethics Committee of ICMR.

Add-Aspirin, a large randomised clinical trial, is taking place in the UK and India. It will recruit 10,000 participants to help find out whether regular aspirin use after treatment for an early stage cancer can prevent the cancer from coming back and preventing deaths. Aspirin will be administered to patients aged 18-75 years who have completed their treatment of either breast, esophagal or stomach cancer.

“There are certain observational evidences suggested that aspirin might be helpful in cancer treatment but this has not proven yet. So we are conducting a large collaboration study with the Medical Research Council in the UK where we are looking at whether giving aspirin to patients with cancer for five years after treating them improves the outcome. This study will compare groups of people who take aspirin and those who take placebo tablets,” said Dr C Pramesh, professor and chief of thoracic surgery in the department of surgical oncology at the Tata Memorial Centre.

In India, the trial will be conducted at 15 centres including Adyar Cancer Institute, Chennai; TMH; Regional Cancer Centre, Thiruvananthapuram; Sawai Man Singh (SMS) Medical College , Jaipur; and AIIMS New Delhi which treat cancer in large volumes. The Add-Aspirin trial commenced in the UK last year spanning over 120 centres, said Dr Pramesh.

Talking about reason behind enrolling adult patients in the trial, he said that breast, esophagal and stomach cancer occurs only in adult people. Hence the adult participants will be enrolled in the study.

Studies show that because aspirin thins the blood, it can also help to lower the chances of a heart attack or a stroke caused by a blood clot. In these studies aspirin appeared to reduce the number of people who developed cancer and, if people did develop cancer, it appeared to be less likely to spread. Researchers therefore believe that aspirin may stop cancer coming back in people who have had treatment for an early stage cancer. But, importantly, since previous studies were not specifically designed to answer this question, there is not any reliable evidence yet.

In India around 60,000 people are diagnosed with esophageal cancer every year. Although the occurrence of stomach cancer in overall India is considerably low, the National Cancer Registry Programme has shown that its prevalence is high in the North Eastern Indian states, especially Mizoram. Globally, stomach cancer stands at the fifth position in the table of highest occurring cancer types. Every year minimum 100,000 new breast cancer patients are diagnosed in India as per ICMR report.