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Four Cups of Coffee A Day Cuts Risk of Oral Cancer

Posted by Unknown on from the time-to-pick-up-a-smoking-habit dept.

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%.

2 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. Relative versus absolute risk by gringer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  2. surely, there were other results... by Goldsmith · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!