Coffee drinkers are less prone to aggressive breast cancer?

women who drink a substantial amount of coffee per day can reduce their risk of developing a particular type of breast cancer, Swedish researchers say.

Their study linked the consumption of five or more cups of coffee per day to a relatively marked reduction in the guarantee-responsive disease called ER-negative breast cancer. However, the consumption of coffee did not appear to reduce the risk of developing the ER-positive breast cancer, a form of receptors sensitive to estrogen hormones of the disease.

Daily coffee consumption may protect against the most aggressive type of cancer of the breast, ER-negative, said study co-author Dr. by Hal, Professor in the Department of medical epidemiology and biostatistics at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

"Now, we have not all the details," he warned. "We don't know, for example, what specific type of coffee that we are talking about here. But we know it is that the protective effect is striking and remains same after adjustment for many other factors that have the potential to play a protective role. And we know that we are talking about what we could call a relatively normal amount of drinking coffee. Certainly, we speak not consuming huge amounts of coffee. It is therefore a very intriguing conclusion. ?

The study, reported online on 11 may in the Breast Cancer Research, 5929 Swedish involved, aged 50 to 74. About half of the women had breast cancer.

Questionnaires were used to evaluate the behaviour and characteristics of health, including tobacco and alcohol patterns, physical activity routines, family history of breast cancer, hormone treatment protocols, nutritional intake, body mass indexlevel of educational attainment and coffee consumption patterns. Status of the tumour and chest type of cancer have also been noted.

The tentative conclusion: drinking coffee appeared to stimulate a "large reduction" ER-negative breast cancer risk, the researchers wrote. Women who drank five cups of coffee a day that had a lower risk of 33 to 57% for cancer ER-negative, that is those who drank less than one cup a day.

The study revealed an apparent association between coffee consumption and a reduction in the risk of breast cancer, but not a relationship of cause and effect.

And Hal was not anxious for consumers to switch to conclusions.

"There are one or two other studies have pointed in the same direction as ours - but not many, to some", he warned. "So before that I would go not my neighbours to start drinking coffee more that say that they already do, I would like to know what is the biological mechanism at work here." And it is not yet clear. ?

HAL noted that he and his colleagues are currently working on a new study to tease this information.

Dr. Stephanie Bernik, Chief of surgical oncology at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, described the findings as "interesting" and "provocation", given that the kind of cancer coffee appears to protect against is one for which there are relatively few effective treatments.

"It is this type of study that opens the door to the improvement of the treatments, as scientists seek to discover what biological factors in a substance are beneficial and then attempt to retrieve these factors and use them to defend themselves against cancer"noted Bernik. "The objective would be to try to discover what is in the coffee can be beneficial."

"The next step is to know what chemical factors in coffee cause the decrease in the rate of cancer, and then try to see if these same chemicals can be used to treat a patient once they are already diagnosed cancer"said.""