How coffee can help prevent liver cancer

by ROBIN YAPP, Daily Mail

Last updated at 11:19 16 February 2005


Drinking a cup of coffee every day may help to protect against liver cancer, researchers have found.

They discovered that those who consume one or two cups of coffee on a daily basis halve their risk of the disease.

The effect was found to be even stronger with greater consumption - those drinking at least five cups a day reduced the risk by three-quarters.

Scientists believe antioxidants in coffee may be responsible for the protective effect. Antioxidants are chemicals which fight disease by removing naturally occurring substances in the body called free radicals that can damage tissue.

Liver cancer claims around 2,500 lives every year in Britain and is diagnosed in a similar number annually.

But experts said more research is needed to confirm the findings and said drinking coffee may also have negative effects on health.

Heart risk

Studies have previously suggested that those who drink four or more cups of coffee a day can reduce their risk of heart disease by dropping coffee from their diet altogether.

In the latest research, Japanese scientists asked more than 90,000 middle-aged men and women about how regularly they drank coffee. Over a ten-year follow-up period, 334 were diagnosed with liver cancer.

Researchers at the National Cancer Centre in Tokyo found that those who drank coffee almost every day had a 51 per cent lower risk of developing this type of cancer than those who almost never drank coffee.

They also saw a proportional effect according to how much coffee people consumed, according to the study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Those who said they drank one or two cups a day had a 48 per cent lower risk. This rose to 52 per cent for those drinking three or four cups and 76 per cent for anyone drinking five cups a day or more.

The scientists also asked participants about smoking and drinking, which increase the risk of liver cancer, and how often they ate green vegetables and drank green tea, which may be protective.

They found the association between coffee drinking and a lower risk of liver cancer risk still remained, even after taking into account these lifestyle factors.

No distinction was made in the study between caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee and the researchers say they cannot determine whether caffeine could be responsible.

They suspect that the protective effect may instead be caused by antioxidants in coffee such as chlorogenic acid but said further research is needed to prove their findings.

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