Drinking coffee can reduce your risk of developing basal cell carcinoma, according to new research…and the more coffee, the better.
Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School not only found a link between increased coffee consumption and decreased skin cancer risk (women who drank 3 cups a day were less likely to develop skin cancer than those who drank a few cups a month), but also a link between overall increased caffeine intake and decreased skin cancer risk. There was NO link found with decaffeinated coffee.
“These results really suggest that it is the caffeine in coffee that is responsible for the decreased risk of basal cell carcinoma associated with increasing coffee consumption,” said study researcher Jiali Han, Ph.D., an associate professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston and Harvard School of Public Health. “This would be consistent with published mouse data, which indicate caffeine can block skin tumor formation. However, more studies in different population cohorts and additional mechanistic studies will be needed before we can say this definitively.”
Basal cell carcinoma is the most common type of skin cancer, and this year there are expected to be more than 2,000,000 new cases of nonmelanoma skin cancer in the United States alone.
But if you aren’t already a big coffee drinker, that doesn’t mean you should start now. In fact, researchers advice against it.
“However, our results add basal cell carcinoma to a list of conditions for which risk is decreased with increasing coffee consumption,” said Han. “This list includes conditions with serious negative health consequences such as Type 2 diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.”
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Go Ahead – Keep the Coffee Brewing!
