Slashdot Mirror
Four Cups of Coffee A Day Cuts Risk of Oral Cancer
An anonymous reader writes "Coffee may help lower the risk of developing oral and pharyngeal cancer and of dying from the disease. The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, was conducted using the Cancer Prevention Study II. The large cohort study began in 1982 by the American Cancer Society. Researchers were able to examine 968,432 men and women, none of whom had cancer at the time of their enrollment in the study."
Four or more cups a day lowered the risk of getting oral cancers by a whopping 49%.
Chaw tabaccy, cuppajoe. Chaw tabaccy, cuppajoe. Repeat all day long. What could possibly go wrong?
At least cancer may give me a few more years to live.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Four or more cups a day lowered the risk of getting oral cancers by 49%."
Is that public relations from coffee producers?
Did the percentage of oral cancers go down because people died from diabetes?
I'm VERY skeptical.
taste than most human beings.
...but what does it increase the chances of? Well, besides drug (caffeine) addiction?
Come on, there's always a catch...
Smokers will normally drink coffee whilst having a cig. Whilst the coffee opens up the taste buds, it increases the risk of smokers having mouth / tongue cancer....
I like coffee. I REALLY LIKE COFFEE. I drink a lot of coffee. SURE I PEE A LOT, and YES well MAYBE but not REALLY, Iâ(TM)m NOT HIGH STRUNG. I just tell MY FRIENDS to MELLOW THE FUCK OUT. Itâ(TM)s not me, itâ(TM)s you. YOU MOTHER FUCKER. Not me, you. I love coffee. HOW FAST ARE WE GOING? I have things to do. Good bye⦠SERIOUSLY, GOOD FUCKING BYE. Good bye. I love coffee. Or is it cocaine, Iâ(TM)m not sure. Or maybe Iâ(TM)m a crack head? HELLO! HELLO! Yellow mellow. Coffee? Did someone say coffee? I love coffee. Mostly triple espressos, no water no ice. LOVE the drip. I LOVE THE FUCKING DRIP. Coffee that is.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Anyone good with statistics? Sounds to me like 49% is actually bad, I mean, 51% of the people in this study got cancer.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Lightweights! I assume they consider cup to be 8 fluid ounces. In which case I drink two cups just to wake up.
4 cups a day lowered the risk of getting oral cancers.
Because at 4 cups a day, you're not eating, so your cells split more slowly (about 20% slower)... And that reduces the risk of cancer, since there are fewer opportunities for cancer to develop.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Fouror more cups a day lowered the risk of getting oral cancers by 49%.
MEIN FOUROR! I can TALK!!!
You sure it doesn't mean that those with the physical constitution to withstand 4 cups of coffee are resistant to oral cancers?
These studies are meaningless.
Coffee seems harmless, so EVERYONE uses it, EXPECTS you to use it.
And the 'best coffee' in the world comes out of a cats ass. That's true horror when it comes to drugs.
Just say no to coffee. Down that path is madness.
I find that changing relative risk to absolute risk makes the wow factor of these studies go down considerably. The absolute risk is of getting oral cancers and dying from them can be derived from the abstract:
Among 968,432 men and women who were cancer free at enrollment, 868 deaths due to oral/pharyngeal cancer occurred during 26 years of follow-up.
So the 26-year absolute risk of death due to oral/pharyngeal cancer in this study was about 1 in 1,000 (one thousand). Assuming an even spread across the years, that's also about 1 in 30,000 for any given year.
Drinking greater than 4 cups of coffee a day has a relative risk of about 0.5, so that's about 1 in 2,000 over 26 years (a difference of 0.045%), or about 1 in 60,000 in any given year (a difference of 0.0017%).
Note that this risk reduction is associated with death due specifically to oral/pharyngeal cancer, not the cancer alone -- it does not follow from these results that drinking coffee reduces your risk of getting cancer. If you get oral/pharyngeal cancer, but die from being impaled by an angry unicorn, it doesn't count for the purposes of this result / association.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
On face value this look robust with 968,432 men and women.
Have to get the paper and search for the devil in the detail as always.
Cheers
A 26 year study, following 968,432 people and these guys draw a conclusion revolving around coffee and a cancer involving 0.09% of the people in the study?
That's some serious barrel scraping on that data set.
That said, it's one more argument to use when my wife complains that I drink too much coffee. Go science!
Neglects to mention that people who work in an occupation where they have an opportunity to get four cups of coffee a day are usually office or transport jobs.... not dangerous ones. Any thoughts?
Four cups a day That's the addict limit.
I think everyone knows that in the long run, this does more harm than good. *Much more harm*.
Subsequent research will no doubt show that the coffee isn't directly responsible. People drinking 4 or more cups of coffee a day are far too wired to engage in oral sex, so the result of fewer infections of oral STD's leads to fewer oral cancers.
You sure it doesn't mean that those with the physical constitution to withstand 4 cups of coffee are resistant to oral cancers?
These studies are meaningless.
You will discover the meaning only if you drink coffee. No, I mean lots of coffee... you should strive to get over the 4 cups.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Not quite as impressive as the 100% reduction in the rate of Alzheimer's, but 49% is still pretty damn good. Not sure what's up with all the anti-coffee trolls calling this propaganda from "the coffee industry".
Sure because the people who drank more than 4 cups a day died of other "natural" causes like a tac a cardia, its a blip but it could have been caused by a few other behavioral coincidences. It feels a little more like someone trying to get value out of 26 years of possibly unfruitful research. there's another study that show's no determinable link! http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/49/4/1049.short
but certainly you can't disprove something by showing no determinable results on it.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
868 people out of 968K comes out at roughly ~0.09% got the cancer. If the heavy coffee drinker had a 50% lower risk then naively we got 289 heavy coffee drinker and 579 non coffee drinker. Or a risk of 0.058% for non coffee drinker and 0.029% for heavy coffee drinker. Put in perspective you have 1 chance of out 1700 to get the cancer, and you lower it to 1 chance out of 3400. Not worth being forced to drink the filthy filthy thing.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
....coffee is good for us again? Or maybe at least until next week, when the media sensationalizes some stupid study that shows drinking ten or more cups of coffee a day increases our 1 in 10^8 chance of developing some condition by 10%.
... How many Norwegians have oral cancer.
Or all the other people on this list of heavy coffee consumers.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
It has been proven that many throat cancers are also from the HPV, like cervical cancer.
It's quite possible that drinking 4 cups of a coffee a day isn't what protecting it, maybe it's the demographic who drink that amount of coffee not having sex?
haha: captcha = colons
This. There is a reason 2/3s~ of the human race don't get cancer. Hint, it isn't because they were lucky.
Most people develop and destroy minor cancers throughout their entire life, a little known fact that seems to be forgotten by the majority.
These people, even exposed to high numbers of carcinogens still don't develop full-on cancers.
That is a genetic reason and one we still don't fully understand yet, that is different even from diet. (but diet does increase your defences too)
No, Petri-dish tests aren't a human body. So don't say you can infect anyone with cancer straight-up. Biology doesn't work like that.
Research on cancer lines isn't exactly helpful, either, since those came from people who developed full-on cancers!
1) All internal links broken.
2) Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 523568083
Varnish cache server
Now for the study proving that pizza and beer are good also. I feel I may be a valid entry to the data set there...
Sure, I drink coffee. At least, 1 mug at breakfast, often a couple more expressos during the day. Often I have to go running to the toilets, in a couple of minutes. I suspect I am allergic to it, or to some substance added when they are processing it. Furthermore, I would like to know who paid for this study. There is a huge industry around coffee abuse.
Every day, about 310,000,000 Americans do not get cancer of any kind.
The Sun also rises every day.
Therefore, we can conclude with 95% confidence that Sunrise prevents cancer.
Repeat: Correlation does not imply causation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation
It's not the coffee. It's the antioxidants in the coffee. For a lot of Americans, coffee is probably the only steady source of antioxidants in their diets.
It's the same thing as with wine. Drinking some wine everyday isn't good for your heart because the wine is good for you. It's because of the antioxidants that were in the grapes.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
The traditional measure of a "cup" of coffee, at least in the United States, is 6 fluid ounces, 177 ml. So "four cups" would be about 700ml.
Drinking cyanide daily would also lower oral cancer death rates...
Soft drinks too.
Many diseases are mediated by the microflora living on and in the human body; e.g. we now know that ulcers mostly result from bacterial infections in the stomach. A lot of oral cancer comes from the STD HPV. I'd bet that a lot of coffee changes the balance of bateria and fungus and viruses living in the mouth, leading indirectly to a lower incidence of cancer.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Okay, not to be a wet blanket, but my Dad told me about this a week ago, after reading about it in his subscription of AARP's [print] magazine. Shouldn't us young[er], technologically-savvy, electronically-delivered folks be getting science news a little bit faster than the old people get it in their mainstream print magazines?
It is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of the arabica bean that the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking. The shaking becomes a warning. It is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion.
... Time to drink tea :p
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
This is what, the third article on slashdot as of late trying to convince us that coffee has some magical positive effect?
Stop trying to pass off your bad habits as good ones, next you'll tell me smoking is great for your body too.
Since drinking coffee is proving to be so good for oral cancer, I am pioneering a new study: taking coffee rectally to improve rates of colon cancer.
OK for 4 cups, but where's the research on those of us who drink 1 gal. / day? And intravenously?
What a horrible site medicaldaily is. I hate a site that plays 2 ads at the same time without my permission. Ban it.
I don't know how it was accomplished, but I'm guessing there was fraud.
Slashdot has a LONG history of running articles that are in fact advertisements, many people have said. (They call them Slashvertisements.)
Now we are seeing stories from Medical Daily.com, a publication that seems to me to be EXTREMELY unreliable public relations.
Consider this: How did Slashdot become a medical web site?
...pour ... get me uh, you know... uh... another cup ... of uh java... uh coffee...
More likely it is just fraud, in my opinion. Here's another one of today's articles in Medical Daily: A Tomato a Day Keeps the Shrink Away: How Eating Tomatoes Can Cut the Risk of Depression by Half
You sure it doesn't mean that those with the physical constitution to withstand 4 cups of coffee are resistant to oral cancers?
Withstand four cups of coffee?? That doesn't make sense at all, most coffee drinkers I know drink at least that much, and most non-coffee drinkers I know don't drink it because they just don't like the taste. The only people I know who hold it down to two cups are older folks; caffiene makes them shake.
And yes, correlation doesn't prove causation, but the fact that it's cancers of body parts that the coffee physically touches sure indicates a causation. I mean, look -- dropping a rock on your foot correlates with a painful foot. But correlation does not prove causation, so maybe it's just coincidence that it always hurts when you drop a rock on your foot?
Free Martian Whores!
Four cups a day That's the addict limit.
Daily use of any amount of an addictive substance will cause addiction.
I think everyone knows that in the long run, this does more harm than good.
I can cite studies that show all sorts of beneficial effects of coffee, but I have yet to run across a single one that shows deleterious effects. You got a citation, coward?
Free Martian Whores!
This. There is a reason 2/3s~ of the human race don't get cancer. Hint, it isn't because they were lucky.
That should be simple to test, by checking if four cups of coffee only lowers oral cancer or other types of cancer too. If it only lowers oral cancer but mysteriously no others, then this lowering effect has nothing to do with your "physical constitution".
Cancer rates are not entirely genetic, that much is already extremely well-established ... there are other major risk factors like smoking and obesity. Given the obesity link, and the fact that coffee also appears to lower your risk of diabetes, I suspect the effect may be coming from elsewhere in the coffee.
One study found that you are less likely to die young if you drink wine instead of beer. It's not because beer causes death or because wine wards death off. It is because at the time the study was done the ratio of wine to beer consumption was strongly correlated with income. Having a higher income was positively correlated with adequate nutrition and health care. Just because drinking coffee correlates with something doesn't mean that it causes it.
Chance of developing oral cancer: 0.0125%. Cut that in half, and it's still pretty much zero. Better solution is to stop shoving carcinogens in there.
is it the acid? the scorching of the inside of one's mouth? the caffeine?
I feel like they should have added a "tea" group in there too or something.
Also, good god, 4 CUPS OF COFFEE A DAY FOR 26 YEARS!? sweet jesus, that doesn't seem healthy.
I'm curious what other health effects there were vs a control group. I think THAT would have gotten them a ton more mileage out of the data (IMO)
-
Most people develop and destroy minor cancers throughout their entire life, a little known fact that seems to be forgotten by the majority.
Yep. Say hello to cancer caused by AIDS because your white cells can't fight off the cancer as it normally does.
I much prefer munching the ole Carpet as a cure for what ails me.
nar
Did you wonder, as I did, whether 8 or more cups resulted in a whopping 74% reduction? And how much whopping do we have to do?
I feel I need to explain to non-coffee drinkers that when they say "4 cups a day" they really mean 4 standard coffee cups which are not the ones you see the IT guys walking back to their desk with. The coffee mug we all use is actually 2+ cups of coffee each. When your cell, uh cube mate, goes to get his 4th cup of coffee he is actually getting his 8-10th cup for the day. Do not confuse these measurements. I generally measure my coffee consumption in pots which makes it sound better to non-believers when I say only have 5/6ths a day now.
Four cups is not a large amount of coffee. You can relax a little, which will likely help your stomach more than avoiding coffee.
There's nothing here that says it has to be caffeinated coffee.
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
any news on the joys of 4 Diet Cokes a day?
Four cups a day That's the addict limit.
I think everyone knows that in the long run, this does more harm than good. *Much more harm*.
You drink alcohol, right? Well, if I drink one beer I'm going to get kind of drunk. Two beers will give me a pretty severe hangover. But I'm not going to go around trying to call you an addict if you drink four beers and I'm not going to claim you're suffering the same side effects I do.
When I drink four cups of coffee it's hardly even noticeable.
It's called tolerance and it's something your body does naturally.
Interesting that what used to be bad is now good. Wine, other booze in moderation, coffee, chocolate. To much of these findings were based on personal opinions, not proper data gathering