Cancer is most dangerous when it spreads from its original location to other parts of the body.
This process, known as metastasis, causes most cancer-related deaths and is one of the hardest problems doctors face when treating the disease.
Even when surgeons successfully remove a tumor, a small number of cancer cells may already have escaped and traveled elsewhere.
These wandering cells can move through the blood or lymph system and settle in organs such as the lungs, liver, bones, or brain. At first, the new groups of cancer cells may be far too small to appear on medical scans. They can remain hidden and later grow into new tumors, sometimes months or years after the original cancer was treated.
Doctors often use chemotherapy after surgery to destroy cancer cells that may have been left behind. However, cancer treatment and surgery can also trigger inflammation, which is the body’s natural response to injury or damage. In some situations, this inflammation may create conditions that make it easier for surviving cancer cells to grow and spread.
Researchers at Emory University have investigated whether a familiar pain medicine could help reduce this problem. The drug, ketorolac, belongs to the same broad family of anti-inflammatory medicines as ibuprofen and aspirin.
It is already approved in the United States for short-term treatment of moderate to severe pain, although long-term use is limited because it can cause serious side effects.
In the study, researchers tested ketorolac in mice before surgery. They found that the medicine appeared to help the animals’ immune systems find and destroy cancer cells that had begun spreading through the body. Mice given ketorolac developed fewer metastatic tumors and survived longer than mice that did not receive the treatment.
The findings may also offer an explanation for earlier observations involving people with breast cancer. Previous research found that patients who received ketorolac around the time of cancer surgery appeared to have a lower chance of the disease returning or spreading.
Scientists did not fully understand why this might happen, but the new animal experiments suggest that changes in inflammation and immune activity could play an important role.
The team also tested ketorolac together with low-dose aspirin and omega-3 fatty acids, which are fats commonly found in fish and fish oil. These substances can affect inflammatory processes in the body. The combination produced an even stronger effect in the mice, with better immune responses, fewer metastatic tumors, and improved survival.
The research is important because inflammation is closely connected with cancer. Normally, inflammation helps the body respond to injury and infection, but long-lasting or poorly controlled inflammation can sometimes support tumor growth.
Reducing certain inflammatory signals around the time of surgery could therefore make the environment less favorable for cancer cells that have escaped from the original tumor.
Still, the results do not mean cancer patients should begin taking ketorolac, aspirin, or fish oil on their own. Findings in mice do not always produce the same results in people, and these medicines can cause side effects or interact with other treatments. Researchers will need clinical studies to determine whether the approach is safe and effective for patients, which cancers may benefit, and when the drugs should be given.
The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. If future human research confirms the findings, an inexpensive medicine that has been used for decades could potentially become an additional tool for preventing cancer from spreading after surgery.
If you care about pain, please read studies about how to manage gout with a low-purine diet, and a guide to eating right for arthritis.
For more health information, please see recent studies about the link between processed foods and chronic diseases, and avoid these 8 foods to ease arthritis pain.
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