Research: Coffee may slow spread of colon cancer
Just a few cups of coffee a day may help slow down the deadly progression of advanced colon cancer, new research finds.
Of the nearly 1,200 patients in the study, those who drank four or more cups of java on a daily basis had 36% higher odds of surviving during the 13-year study period.
Metastatic colon cancer, which has spread from its original location, “remains an incurable disease in most cases,” said study co-lead author Christopher Mackintosh, a medical student at the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine in Phoenix.
“However, a number of lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise have been associated with prolonged life span for those dealing with the disease,” Mackintosh noted. “Our study found that patients being treated with chemotherapy for metastatic colorectal cancers who drank coffee saw a longer period of time before both growth of their cancer and before death.”
The participants were part of a larger cancer study conducted between 2005 and 2018.
Researchers ultimately found that the more coffee consumed, the greater the survival benefit. For example, Mackintosh noted that patients who consumed up to a single cup of coffee per day tended to survive 30 months post-diagnosis. But those who drank two or three cups daily survived 32 months. And those who consumed four or more cups a day saw their survival shoot up to 39 months.
The protective benefit held, regardless of whether patients drank caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.
The findings were published online Sept. 17 in the journal JAMA Oncology.
The researchers cautioned that although their work pinpoints a link between coffee and better cancer outcomes, it does not prove that drinking coffee actually causes mortality risk to drop or colon cancer growth to slow.
Mackintosh explicitly cautioned colon cancer patients “against drastically increasing their coffee consumption just because of this study.”