Coffee, cancer’s enemy

This should make you perk up; researchers have found frequent coffee consumption, more than four cups daily, can diminish the risk of head and neck cancer while others have found the way it is prepared can increase or decrease breast, lung and pancreatic cancer risk.

The findings are to be published in the June 22 online edition of the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

Mia Hashibe, PhD, an assistant professor in the department of family and preventive medicine at the University of Utah and an investigator at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, led the study, which analyzed the results of nine studies collected by the International Head and Neck Cancer Epidemiology (INHANCE) consortium.

"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," said Hashibe after concluding that frequent coffee drinkers had a "39 percent decreased risk of oral cavity and pharynx cancers combined" compared to those who did not consume the beverage in such large quantities.

Both decaffeinated coffee and tea were not linked with head and neck cancer risk.

Hashibe added, "What makes our results so unique is that 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."

Coffee drinking has also been linked with decreasing prostate cancer risk by 60 percent and lowering the  risk of brain tumors (gliomas).

Before you start brewing up your favorite blend, researchers at Umeå University in Sweden have found how you brew your coffee is as important as how much you drink and their findings are published in the online edition of the journal Cancer Causes and Control on May 29.

To ward off cancer, the question may be to filter, or not?

Scandinavian boiled coffee similar to French press and Turkish/Greek coffee allows the coffee to maintain its fatty acids that have been shown via animal models to "inhibit the growth of cancer."

The team of researchers looked at 64,603 participants enrolled and studied the way they brewed their coffee and cancer links, concluding that in "women who drank boiled coffee more than four times a day there was a lowered risk of breast cancer compared with women who drank coffee less than once a day."

Whereas with "women who drank filtered coffee there was an increased risk for early breast cancer (under 49 years old) and a decreased risk for late breast cancer (over 55 years old)."

However boiling might not be best for everyone as "boiled-coffee drinkers, but not filtered-coffee drinkers, also had an increased risk of pancreatic cancer and lung cancer among men."

Confused yet?

Four plus cups a day seems to decrease specific cancer risks and men and women aged 50+ should filter while women under 50 should boil.

Hashibe's full study to be available on June 22, here: http://intl-cebp.aacrjournals.org
Full study, "Consumption of filtered and boiled coffee and the risk of incident cancer: a prospective cohort study": http://www.springerlink.com/content/vn61542292400431/?p=8c110095bf01445580a83c33615e971e&pi=9