Drinking coffee can lower the risk of prostate cancer.
Researchers combine data from 16 prospective studies that calculate the risk associated with the highest versus the lowest coffee consumption. In total, there were 1,081,586 participants and 57,732 cases of prostate cancer in studies conducted in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The review appears in BMJ Open.
Compared to men who drank the least coffee, those who drank the most had a 9 percent lower risk of prostate cancer. Their risk for advanced cancer was 12 percent lower, and their risk for fatal diseases was 16 percent lower. The researchers calculated that the risk for each additional daily cup of coffee decreased by nearly 1 percent.
Fourteen of the studies were considered high quality, with little risk of bias, and the large sample size gives the review considerable strength. Most studies checked for family history of prostate cancer, race, smoking, alcohol use, BMI, and physical activity, although there are other variables that the researchers could not account for.
The data on coffee drinking depended on self-reports, which can be unreliable. In addition, all the studies were observational, thus only showing a link between coffee drinking and risk of prostate cancer, not cause and effect.
However, the authors, led by Kefeng Wang of China Medical University in Shenyang, China, write that “men can be encouraged to increase their coffee consumption to reduce the risk of prostate cancer.”