A Low fat diet and aspirin, both shown to help reduce the risk of cancer, may also help keep it from coming back in some patients, researchers reported on Monday.

breast cancer patients who followed a modest low-fat diet, cutting oils, margarine and red meat, were 24 percent less likely to have their cancer come back, one team found.

In another study, Colon cancer patients who took regular aspirin were 50 percent less likely to have a relapse.

Doctors at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting said they were delighted to have some simple suggestions to offer patients who have undergone surgery, chemotherapy or radiation and now want to know what to do to keep the cancer from returning.

“I think it’s exciting,” said Dr. Robert Morgan, who treats patients with breast, brain and Ovarian cancer at the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, California.

“I will definitely counsel them that this is true. I am sure that it will result in more referrals to nutritionists.”

But Dr. Eric Winer of Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute was skeptical. “The one thing you don’t want is for every woman who has breast cancer to feel she is damaging her health if she has an ice cream cone,” he said in an interview.

Winer said he would need more data from studies showing it was really the low-fat diet that had the effect.

For the diet study, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of the University of California Los Angeles and colleagues worked with more than 2,400 women being treated for breast cancer.

They put 975 of them on a moderately low fat diet, with 33 grams of fat a day, and compared their progress to the other 1,462 women, who ate on average 51 grams a day.

It was in line with government recommendations to eat less fat and more fruits and vegetables, Chlebowski said. They met with nutritionists eight times and had their eating habits checked with random telephone calls.

JETTISONING JUNK FOOD

“Things eliminated would be things like chips, cheese and crackers - fat-rich dairy - and substitute things like popcorn,” he said. Fast-food is also dangerous, he said. “One breakfast sandwich has 47 fat grams,” Chlebowski told a news conference.

The researchers were surprised by one thing. About 80 percent of breast cancers are fueled in part by the hormone estrogen, which is made by fat cells.

Studies have shown that low-fat diets reduce the risk of breast cancer and doctors had thought it might be because fat cells produce estrogen.

But in Chlebowski’s study, the most pronounced effect was in the 20 percent of women whose tumors were hormone-receptor negative, meaning they do not respond to estrogen.

In that group, the low-fat diet reduced the risk of cancer coming back by 42 percent over the five years the patients have been watched so far and 8 percent fewer of them relapsed after four years.

The women lost an average of four pounds (2 kg) so the weight loss could be a factor, he said. The study should fuel more research, experts agreed.

In the colon cancer study, Dr. Charles Fuchs and colleagues at Dana-Farber watched more than 800 stage III colon cancer patients, whose cancer has spread to nearby lymph nodes but no farther.

About 9 percent, or 75, of the patients consistently took aspirin on their own for various reasons. Those patients had a 50 percent lower overall risk of relapse and death, said Dr. Jeffrey Meyerhardt, who worked with Fuchs on the study.

Non-aspirin drugs called COX-2 inhibitors had a similar effect, but too few patients took them regularly for the researchers to be able to tell if the result was significant, Meyerhardt said.

Normally, Meyerhardt said, surgery alone will cure only about 50 percent of Stage 3 colon cancer patients so anything that will bring that number up is welcome.