Word: aspirins
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Less than a decade ago, aspirin seemed to be losing some of its luster. Marketed since the beginning of the century as a uniquely effective pain and fever fighter, it was suddenly forced to compete with two major rivals -- acetaminophen (Tylenol, Anacin-3) and ibuprofen (Advil, Nuprin) -- that had many of aspirin's benefits without some of its side effects. Worse, aspirin had been linked to Reye's syndrome, a rare but sometimes deadly condition that can afflict children after a bout of flu or chickenpox. Doctors immediately ceased to recommend it for most youngsters, and liquid Tylenol replaced orange...
...wonder drug has made a wondrous comeback. In recent years it has been shown to be a powerful inhibitor of heart attacks and strokes -- a virtue neither acetaminophen nor ibuprofen can match. And last week came preliminary evidence of another major benefit: aspirin reduces the risk of death from colon cancer, a disease that kills 50,000 Americans a year. A major study by the American Cancer Society, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that people who took 16 aspirin tablets or more each month (or equivalent doses of related but lesser known anti-inflammatory drugs...
Still, many questions remain. Since study participants were not randomly assigned to take aspirin, it is possible that those who did were generally more health conscious than average and less likely to develop cancer in the first place. Or perhaps aspirin users had more internal bleeding than the others -- a common side effect of aspirin -- and therefore had their colon cancers detected early and cured readily. The study did not measure the actual ( incidence of colon cancer, just deaths resulting from...
...pain-killer may very well have direct anticancer properties. Unlike acetaminophen, which acts only on the central nervous system, aspirin (chemical name: acetylsalicylic acid) has an extraordinarily broad range of effects. The reason is that it interferes with the production of a diverse class of substances known as prostaglandins, which are found in nearly every body tissue. (Ibuprofen does too, but in a much more limited...
...more than 1,500 different health-insurance programs, each with its own marketing department, complex forms and regulations. Doctors, nurses and clerks are buried in the paperwork needed to keep track of whom to bill for every aspirin tablet. It's a massive waste of time. U.S. health-care providers will spend as much as $90 billion this year on record keeping, according to a Harvard study...