text_1: City of Hope researchers find regular use of aspirin can lower risk of breast cancer for women
text_2: The release focuses on a recent paper published in the journal Breast Cancer Research, which addresses breast cancer risk and regular use of aspirin in low doses. While the release states that low doses of aspirin “reduces the risk of breast cancer in women,” there are problems with how the information is presented. Specifically, it’s impossible to know whether the aspirin affected breast cancer risk based on this study. That’s because this was an observational study — meaning that it could detect a correlation between aspirin use and breast cancer, but not whether the use of aspirin was actually responsible for lower rates of breast cancer. That’s a key distinction. Breast cancer is the second most common type of cancer among women in the United States and is diagnosed in hundreds of thousands of women each year. That means many thousands — if not millions — of women and their loved ones are on the lookout for things they can do to reduce their risk of developing breast cancer. Telling the public that aspirin reduces cancer risk has the potential to influence the daily decisions of those women, which is problematic when the relevant study is unable to make that determination. What’s more, daily aspirin use can cause or exacerbate other health problems, which this release does not address at all.