Aspirin on the Daily

This article can be found at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/22/MNNR1G09QS.DTL&type=science

    Here’s a tremendously brief story on the positive effects of regular aspirin use. Writer Maria Cheng does well in giving the reader just the essentials of this study. One could read the first paragraph and know the substance of everything to follow: “A low dose of aspirin may reduce colon cancer cases by a quarter and deaths by a third.” That says it all. The rest of the story is just more details on the study, such as the specific data obtained and previous aspirin studies.
   
    Though its brevity is a great quality of the story, it could have included more information on the study. How was it conducted? Were there any side effects at all? What are the long-term effects of consistent aspirin use, even if it’s at a low dosage? Cheng could have also given some more input from the scientists involved. She only cites one scientist, and what he said was about the family history of colon cancer, rather than the actual study. But it is good to know that more and more is being learned in the area of medication use: we are still in the early days of medication, and hopefully we will continue to improve treatments and provide the best care possible through meticulous research and proper ethics.