Drinking more coffee could lower your risk of developing basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer, according to a Harvard study published in Cancer Research.
“Our data indicate that the more caffeinated coffee you consume, the lower your risk of developing basal cell carcinoma,” said Jiali Han, Ph.D., associate professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston and Harvard School of Public Health.
“I would not recommend increasing your coffee intake based on these data alone,” said Han. “However, our results add basal cell carcinoma to a list of conditions for which risk is decreased with increasing coffee consumption. This list includes conditions with serious negative health consequences such as Type 2 diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.”
Han used data from the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, which included 112,897 participants. During the follow-up, which lasted more than 20 years, 22,786 people developed basal cell carcinoma. Han found an inverse relationship between all coffee consumption and the risk of basal cell carcinoma — the more coffee the participants drank, the lower their risk. The decrease in risk was also seen for all dietary types of caffeine including tea, cola, and chocolate.
“These results really suggest that it is the caffeine in coffee that is responsible for the decreased risk of basal cell carcinoma associated with increasing coffee consumption,” said Han. “This would be consistent with published mouse data, which indicate caffeine can block skin tumor formation.
In contrast to the findings for basal cell carcinoma, neither coffee consumption nor caffeine intake appeared to lower the risk of the two other forms of skin cancer, squamous cell carcinoma and melanoma, the most deadly form of the disease. Still, Han said, a longer follow-up could reveal an association between caffeine and those two forms of skin cancer as well.
According to the American Cancer Society, more than 2 million Americans are diagnosed with basal and squamous cell skin cancer each year. Although not usually deadly, basal cell skin cancers have a negative impact on both patients' lives and on the healthcare systems. “Given the large number of newly diagnosed cases, daily dietary changes having any protective effect may have an impact on public health,” said Han.