A 12-year of study involving nearly 40,000 US women has found that regular, low doses of aspirin do not generally prevent cancer, and vitamin E is ineffective in warding off heart disease and cancer.
The report did find aspirin might have a protective effect against lung cancer, but the authors said that needs to be confirmed with more research, and they pointed out that there is no way of knowing whether higher doses of aspirin might have yielded different results.
"However, based on the data currently available, we do not suggest that doctors recommend low-dose aspirin therapy for primary prevention of cancer," said Nancy Cook of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, chief author of the aspirin study.
While aspirin may not work for cancer, a number of earlier studies have found it does appear to help prevent heart disease, a bigger killer of women than cancer.