News and Views

Colon cancer patients who regularly drink caffeinated coffee may be lowering their risk of tumor recurrence and death from the disease. People with advanced (stage III) colon cancer who drank four or more cups of caffeinated coffee every day had 52 per cent lower odds of disease recurrence of cancer or death compared with coffee abstainers. Even people who regularly drank slightly less (two to three cups) per day appeared to reap some of the same benefits, just to a lesser degree explained study lead author Charles Fuchs, Director of the Gastrointestinal Cancer Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Caffeinated coffee seems to independently improve the outcome for colon cancer patients. To explore coffee's impact on colon cancer, the research team focused on roughly 950 people with stage III colon cancer. They all completed nutrition questionnaires while undergoing post surgical chemotherapy treatment at some point between 1999 and 2001. Dietary information was collected again six months after completion of chemotherapy. The study volunteers were asked about more than 130 different food and drink items. Those items included caffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee and non-herbal (caffeinated) tea. In turn, cancer recurrence and patient death rates were followed for an average of a little more than seven years. Cancer returned in 329 people, mostly within five years of initial treatment. Of these, 288 died of their disease. An additional 36 people who didn't have a diagnosis of a cancer recurrence also died during the study follow-up. The researchers found that drinking two cups of caffeinated coffee daily was associated with a reduced risk for cancer recurrence and colon cancer death. That protection was even greater for those consuming three or four cups of coffee daily.