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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%.
At least cancer may give me a few more years to live.
Have gnu, will travel.
...but what does it increase the chances of? Well, besides drug (caffeine) addiction?
Come on, there's always a catch...
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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?
I grew up in town where most people worked some sort of blue collar job, and I recall plenty of big coffee drinkers. I spent a summer working in a steel mill and it wasn't unusual to see guys arriving with large thermoses of coffee. Those that didn't bring it to work could purchase it from vending machines in the break rooms. A couple of cups before work, a couple during breaks or lunch, and by the end of the day they had had at least four cups of coffee.
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.
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?
If 100 out of 10000 non-coffee-drinkers got cancer (1%) and 51 out of 10000 coffee drinkers got cancer (0.51%) that's a 49% decrease.
I'm VERY skeptical.
Seriously? Did you not RTFS? "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."
What is someone who doesn't trust science fucking doing at slashdot, anyway? Go back to Sports Illustrated and leave us nerds alone, dumbass.
Free Martian Whores!
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.