The researchers, however, said that it is premature to recommend colon cancer patients to drink coffee in order to prevent the return of the disease. There was about a 42% improvement in disease-free survival for people who consumed four or more cups of coffee per day following their treatment of colon cancer.
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“There is already an abundance of evidence that diet and lifestyle can have a great deal of positive impact in terms of reducing the risk for developing colon cancer”, explained study lead author Dr. Charles Fuchs, director of the Gastrointestinal Cancer Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “Now we have found that caffeinated coffee seems to independently improve the outcome for colon cancer patients”. Patients who drank a single daily cup saw no benefits from the beverage. “And it is also true that coffee has a lot of components in addition to caffeine that could possibly be relevant to colon cancer”, he added. For individuals with stage III cancer, tumors have been discovered in the lymph nodes near the original tumor, but there are no indications of further metastasis. Even people who regularly drank slightly less (two to three cups) per day appeared to reap some of the same benefits, just to a lesser degree.
It follows a number of recent studies suggesting that coffee may have protective effects against the development of several kinds of cancer, including reduced risks of postmenopausal breast cancer, melanoma, liver cancer, advanced prostate cancer. They say that the beverage could aid throughout the treatment with high chances of cure, while help in stopping its recurrence. We found that regular coffee drinkers experienced a significant reduction in risk of having their cancer recur or dying of cancer. Coffee drinking has also been shown to reduce the risk of Type 2 diabetes.
And while the results of the study are promising, researchers aren’t exactly sure how coffee consumption benefited the coffee-drinking patients, or why the study yielded such results. “If you are a coffee drinker and are being treated for colon cancer, don’t stop”, he said.
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Participants reported dietary intake of caffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee, and nonherbal tea, as well as 128 other items, before Fuchs and his team analysed the influence of coffee, nonherbal tea, and caffeine on cancer recurrence and mortality using proportional hazard modelling. The caffeine may increase insulin sensitivity, causing the body to need less insulin to function properly, and by doing so, may decrease inflammation which may result in the reduced recurrence.
