Aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) may help prevent esophageal cancer from developing in patients with Barrett’s esophagus, researchers report.Barrett’s esophagus is a precancerous condition in which the esophagus changes so that some of its lining is replaced by tissue similar to that normally found in the intestine. People with Barrett’s esophagus are 50 times more likely to develop a type of throat cancer called esophageal adenocarcinoma, the most rapidly increasing cancer in the United States. “We observed that people who had Barrett’s esophagus who were taking aspirin and other NSAIDs were about a third less likely to go on to get esophageal cancer, compared with people who never took NSAIDs regularly,” said study author Dr. Thomas L. Vaughan, head of the epidemiology program at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.Besides aspirin, the NSAID group of pain relievers include ibuprofen, naproxen and the Cox-2 painkillers Vioxx, Bextra and Celebrex -- of which only Celebrex remains on U.S. drugstore shelves.Reporting in the Nov. 7 online edition of The Lancet Oncology, Vaughan and his colleagues collected data on 350 people diagnosed with Barrett’s esophagus. For more than five years, Vaughan’s team looked at whether NSAID use correlated with the development of esophageal adenocarcinoma in these patients.