Study: coffee drinkers have less liver cancer.
Publication: Tea & Coffee Trade Journal
Date: April 20 2005
Subject: Liver cancer (Diagnosis), Coffee habit, Liver cancer (Prevention)
Location: Japan

JAPAN -- Researchers in Japan have discovered some eye-opening news about
coffee: It may help prevent the most common type of liver cancer, reports
the Globe and Mail.

A study of more than 90,000 Japanese found that people who drank coffee
daily or nearly every day had half the liver cancer risk of those who never
drank coffee. The protective effect occurred in people who drank one to two
cups a day and increased at three to four cups.

Animal studies have suggested a protective association of coffee with liver
cancer, so the research team led by Monami Inoue of the National Cancer
Center in Tokyo analyzed a 10-year public-health study to determine coffee
use by people diagnosed with liver cancer and people who did not have
cancer.

They found the likely occurrence of liver cancer in people who never or
almost never drank coffee was 547.2 cases per 100,000 people over 10 years.
But for people who drank coffee daily, the risk was 214.6 cases per 100,000,
the researchers report in this week's issue of the U.S. Journal of the
National Cancer Institute.

They were unable to compare the effect of regular and decaffeinated coffee,
however, because decal is rarely consumed in Japan.

The caffeine in coffee has been shown in other studies to prompt mental
alertness in many drinkers, although it makes some people nervous.

Some studies have suggested that caffeine aggravates symptoms of menopause
or intensifies the side effects of some antibiotics. Heavy caffeine use has
been linked to miscarriages. But studies have also shown that a skin cream
spiked with caffeine lowers the risk of skin cancer in mice.

While the study found a statistically significant relationship between
drinking coffee and having less liver cancer, the authors note that it needs
to be repeated in other groups.

The reason for the reduction remains unclear. Dr. Inoue's team noted that
coffee contains large amounts of antioxidants, and several animal studies
have indicated that those compounds have the potential to inhibit cancer in
the liver.

In their study, the team also looked at green tea, which contains different
antioxidants; they found no association between drinking the tea and liver
cancer rates.

"Other unidentified substances may also be responsible" for the reduction in
cancers, they said.

"COFFEE IS BACK"
Jamffer