Coffee and a smoke? Maybe not
A new study has looked at coffee drinking and cancer and found alarming news - especially if you also smoke.
|||Cape Town - A new study has linked drinking coffee with lung cancer, suggesting that the more coffee one drinks, the greater the chances of getting the disease.
The study by the US-based National Cancer Institute found that drinking six cups or more a day could increase one’s cancer risk by about 30 percent compared to those who don’t drink coffee at all.
Nearly half a million participants in America’s nutritional study – the NHI-AARP Diet and Health Study – were included.
It was found that the association between coffee and cancer risk was substantially reduced after taking into account tobacco use.
Researchers suggested that the observed association between coffee drinking and cancer could be due to smoking.
They raised concern about the impact of smoking among study participants, citing that most coffee drinkers in the study were substantially more likely to be cigarette smokers.
Together, these observations suggested that the association between coffee drinking and cancer was probably not causal and would have been further reduced with adjustment for lifetime tobacco use.
In this study, coffee intake was strongly associated with adenocarcinoma, while squamous cell carcinoma is most closely linked to smoking. In addition, caffeinated coffee was strongly associated with adenocarcinoma, whereas decaffeinated coffee was most strongly associated with small-cell carcinoma.
Writing in the International Journal of Epidemiology, lead researcher Kristin Guertin said while researchers assessed a number of different aspects of smoking, the study lacked data that would allow researchers to more comprehensively adjust for smoking, including depth of inhalation, years smoked during one’s life and nicotine dependence, among others.
One of the study limitations was that coffee consumption was self-reported and participants were questioned about their coffee consumption in the past year.
Guertin said associations for coffee and lung cancer appeared to be somewhat stronger in men, whereas tobacco use appeared to be lower among women.
“We observed a positive association between coffee drinking and lung cancer
.
“As our adjustment for lifetime tobacco use is imperfect, it is likely that the observed association between coffee drinking and lung cancer in our cohort is due to residual confounding by tobacco smoking. Nevertheless, we cannot rule out a positive association,” she wrote.
Cape Argus
sipokazi.fokazi@inl.co.za