It has already been credited with helping to reduce heart attack risk, but now it seems that daily doses of aspirin could also help tackle cancer.
New research from Texas suggests the pain-relief medication's interaction with blood cells could stop tumors from growing.
The findings, which were published in the February 2017 issue of Cancer Prevention Research, offers fresh scope for future treatment possibilities.
Specifically, it notes that how the drug's response to platelets - the blood's clotting agent - may assist oncology patients.
Academics commissioned by Veterans Affairs Research found the way aspirin disrupts the normal clotting process can deprive the malignant masses from expanding.
Their lab tests showed it works by shutting down the enzyme COX-1, thereby curbing the number of circulating platelets and their level of activity.
'These results suggest that aspirin's chemopreventive effects may be due, in part, to the drug blocking the proneoplastic action of platelets,' they wrote.
The news comes less than six months after it was revealed that liquid aspirin can cross the 'blood-brain barrier' - a hurdle which has so far stopped cancer drugs attacking brain tumors.
The research, carried out by Portsmouth University and a three-man start-up company in Manchester, was welcomed by experts as a 'game-changer'.
More than 16,000 people each year in Britain are diagnosed with a brain tumor, yet campaigners have long warned that patients are left behind by a system which allocates them just 1 per cent of the national cancer research spending.
Less than 20 percent of brain cancer patients survive more than five years, compared to 87 percent for breast cancer and 98 percent for testicular cancer.
By JAMES DRAPER FOR MAILONLINE
The Daily Mail News
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