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%.
...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.
No worries, the article clearly said "coffee."
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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!
That's the wrong "Yeah, but"
The real "Yeah, but" is this one:
Yeah, but my gf thinks it tastes bad when I drink too much coffee, therefore
Four Cups of Coffee A Day Cuts Risk of Oral Sex
I'm so sorry but the balance is just not there
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?
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!