(Bloomberg) — Aspirin’s use fighting cancer has the potential to increase pension liabilities by as much as $100 billion by extending lifespans, a risk modeler says in a report.
The pension costs for men in the U.K. could rise by 0.7% within 20 years if more people begin taking aspirin daily, according to a statement by Risk Management Solutions Inc. this week. An increase of that magnitude across the more than $13 trillion in pension liabilities in North America and Europe would be about the same as everyone giving up smoking within a generation, the modeling firm says.
Employers and governments are grappling with obligations to retirees as
“Aspirin was not known to be a protection against cancer,” says Andrew Coburn, a senior vice president of RMS’s LifeRisks platform and one of the report’s authors. “It’s another one that people just didn’t expect” when they forecast liabilities.
Daily doses of aspirin reduce the chances of developing or dying from cancer earlier than previously thought and also prevent tumors from spreading, studies published in the Lancet medical journal last year showed.
The findings could increase the use of a drug that’s cheaper and more readily available than other cancer-fighting treatments, RMS says in its report. The modeling firm ran different scenarios about how widely aspirin would be used to predict additional pension costs.
Some studies show up to 25% of people aged 50 and older in the United States are already taking aspirin each day, mainly to prevent heart disease, says Dr. Charlie Fuchs, director of the gastrointestinal cancer program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
“Whatever is driving people to do it, it potentially has an impact on mortality through cancer risk reduction,” he says.
Potential side effects, including dangerous bleeding, may discourage doctors from advising patients to take aspirin daily, he adds.
“There aren’t recommendations for an average-risk person to take aspirin to prevent cancer,” he says. “In terms of the state of the science, there is even yet more literature to support the benefits of aspirin, but the risks, albeit small, haven’t gone away.”
Bayer AG, based in Leverkusen, Germany, invented aspirin and has sold it since 1899. A bottle of 500 generic 325-milligram aspirin tablets marketed by Walgreen Co. costs $8 on drugstore.com, or 1.6 cents a pill. The drug is based on salicin, a chemical found in the bark of the willow tree that was first mentioned about 2,400 years ago by Hippocrates, an ancient Greek considered the father of Western medicine.
