Men treated for prostate cancer who took aspirin regularly for other medical conditions were less likely to die of their cancer than patients who weren’t taking aspirin, according to a new study published on Tuesday in The Journal of Clinical Oncology.

The new report is not a randomized controlled clinical trial of the kind considered the gold standard in medicine, but it adds to an intriguing and growing body of evidence suggesting that aspirin may play a beneficial role in the treatment and possibly the prevention of a variety of cancers. Much of the earlier research on aspirin focused on colon cancer.

“This is another piece of evidence suggesting aspirin does seem to have this effect against cancer across different body sites,” said Dr. Andrew T. Chan, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who studies the role of aspirin in preventing colorectal cancer but was not involved the new research.

In the new study, researchers used the national database of a project known as CaPSURE, for Cancer of the Prostate Strategic Urologic Research Endeavor, to look at nearly 6,000 men who had localized prostate cancer and were treated with surgery or radiotherapy. Just over one-third of the men, or 2,175 of the 5,955, were taking anticoagulants, mostly aspirin.