Our study is on endometrial cancer, early cancer of the lining of the uterus, and for background for why we did the study there was a recent colorectal cancer clinical trial that included patients with specific mutations in their tumours as part of the PI3K pathway. It showed that in patients that… they randomised patients to standard chemotherapy and chemotherapy with aspirin and they showed that there was a significantly improved progression free and overall survival in those patients that were taking aspirin in addition to their chemotherapy. The exciting thing for us was those mutations that they included in that study, up to 50%, maybe even higher, depending on the subtype of endometrial cancer patients, have those same mutations.

So we wanted to see if there might potentially be a benefit of aspirin as well in endometrial cancer patients so we did a retrospective study looking at about 700 patients that were treated at OSU previously and looked to see if taking aspirin at the time of their endometrial cancer diagnosis led to improved survival or something of that nature. What we found was that patients who were taking aspirin when they were diagnosed with endometrial cancer had a lower likelihood of dying from endometrial cancer in our study.

Could you outline the methodology?

We did a retrospective review. So we have large database cohorts of patients that were treated previously at Ohio State and we have IRB approval for those studies. We were able to use that data to look back and ask preliminary questions of things that might impact our patients’ care, whether that be surgical management, what kind of chemotherapy or radiation or whatever else it might be. So we used that a little bit like a springboard to see. This doesn’t prove any of the things that we’re looking at because it is retrospective in nature but a lot of times we use that data initially to see if there is maybe some sort of signal that something might be affecting our patients’ care and then we, a lot of times, will try to use that information going forward in other studies to make a more strong correlation or prove a difference there.

What did you find?

Patients who were taking aspirin at the time of their endometrial cancer diagnosis had a significantly lower chance of dying from endometrial cancer specifically. So disease specific survival was improved in patients taking aspirin compared to those who were not taking aspirin.

What impact could these findings have?

Our hope is that we can use this data to continue to look in other databases, other clinical trials that have already been done that sometimes have a little bit more robust datasets that we can look at to see if maybe we might see a similar association in those trials as well with regard to survival outcomes and aspirin use. Then ultimately our hope is to potentially study this in a prospective manner, similar to that colorectal clinical trial to see if we can actually show that this actually does impact our patients’ survival.