14 DAY TRIAL // Most people drink coffee to make sure that they have the strength and stamina to make it through the workweek without falling asleep at their desk or banging their head on every door in sight. It just so happens that, according to a new paper, this heavenly brew comes with one other perk.
The study, published in yesterday's issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, argues that people who sip four or more cups of coffee on a daily basis are less likely to develop skin cancer.
More precisely, researchers with the US National Cancer Institute say that regular coffee consumption reduces the risk for malignant melanoma, which is a highly aggressive form of skin cancer that develops in cells known to the scientific community as melanocytes.
Documenting the link between coffee and reduced cancer risk
The US National Cancer Institute specialists behind this investigation explain that, to study how coffee consumption influences the risk of being diagnosed with malignant melanoma, they looked at the medical records of as many of 447,357 elderly individuals monitored over the course of 10 years.
Of the people included in this study, 2,904 were told that they had malignant melanoma at some point during the 10 years that researchers kept tabs on their overall health condition. Another 1,874 were diagnosed with early stage melanoma, which is a form of cancer affecting just the top layer of the skin.
Having asked the participants in the study about their coffee consumption habits, the scientists found that those who consumed four or more cups of this brew on a daily basis were 20% less likely to develop malignant melanoma than those who never drank coffee.
“The highest category of coffee intake was inversely associated with malignant melanoma. This association was statistically significant for caffeinated, but not for decaffeinated coffee,” the researchers explain in the paper in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Further investigations are in order, the scientists say
True, evidence indicates that drinking coffee on a regular basis reduces the risk of malignant melanoma. Still, the fact remains that, for the time being at least, the US National Cancer Institute specialists are clueless about why this is the case.
Thus, the researchers cannot say for sure which compound in coffee is the one that protects people from this form of skin cancer that kills thousands of people annually in the US alone. Hence, they urge that further investigations into how coffee keeps people safe from skin cancer be carried out.
Meanwhile, they say that people who drink copious amounts of coffee pretty much each and every day of their life should refrain from lounging in the sun for hours on end without wearing any protection and assume that they are safe from the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation.