Clot-Dissolving Drug Can Lower Risk of Cancer Linked to Clotting

A team of Swedish doctors has found that a drug used to dissolve blood clots may also lower the risk of cancer associated with clotting, according to research in today’s New England Journal of Medicine. Doctors realized a few years ago that people who unexpectedly develop blood clots in their legs and elsewhere face a greater risk of cancer over the next 10 years. Now the team from the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm has found that six months of treatment with the clot-dissolving drug warfarin can lower that cancer risk.

In the study, 15.8% of 419 volunteers who got warfarin for six weeks subsequently developed a tumor. The rate dropped to 10.3% among the 435 people who took the drug for six months. The longer treatment led to fewer cancers of the kidney, bladder, prostate, ovary and uterus.

--Compiled by Times medical writer Thomas H. Maugh II