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Coffee cuts mouth cancer risk, new study suggests
22nd Jun 2010
Four cups of coffee a day may protect against oral cancer, according to a new study.
Researchers found regular coffee drinkers were 39% less likely to develop oral and pharynx cancers than those who didn't drink coffee.
The study, carried out in the US, analysed the outcome of nine previous studies collected by the International Head and Neck Cancer Epidemiology consortium.
The findings were released by the American Association for Cancer Research.
British consumers apparently drink an estimated 70 million cups of coffee a day.
According to Cancer Research UK, mouth cancer kills around 1,600 people a year in Britain and cancer of the oesophagus another 7,400.
In 2008, www.dentistry.co.uk reported that Japanese scientists who tracked patient drinking habits for 13 years found that those drinking at least one cup a day were much less likely to get tumours than those who hardly ever drank coffee.
The experts at the Tohoku University School of Medicine in Japan discovered that certain chemicals found in caffeine protect the body's DNA against damage that can lead to cancer.
Previous studies had produced mixed results on whether coffee has a protective effect.
But now this latest research adds to the body of evidence in favour of its protective qualities.
At the time, the Japanese researchers concluded that ‘coffee could be a preventive factor'.
Of this latest study, lead researcher, Mia Hashibe, says: ‘Since coffee is so widely used and there is a relatively high incidence and low survival rate of these forms of cancers, our results have important public health implications that need to be further addressed.
Mia is assistant professor in the department of family and preventive medicine at the University of Utah.
She adds: ‘We had a very large sample size and, since we combined data across many studies, we had more statistical power to detect associations between cancer and coffee.'
The study appears in the current issue of the journal, Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
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