Consumption of coffee will actually decrease the risk of developing a certain kind of breast cancer according to what Swedish researchers found. What they did is that they compared the consumption of coffee in postmenopausal women diagnosed with cancer and women of the same age with no cancer. They found out that those individuals that consume five or more cups of coffee a day revealed a 0.43 times lower risk of getting estrogen-receptor negative cancers.

The estrogen-receptor negative breast cancer has lesser chance to respond to the hormonal treatments compared to the estrogen-receptor positive breast cancers.

A professor named Dr. Per Hal from the medical epidemiology and biostatics department at the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm together with his co-authors have noticed a disturbing information regarding the benefits to health of coffee.

They have managed to compare their results with the results from a German study. They found out that their data revealed a similar trend however, the relationship has a weaker approach. Their conclusion was published on the online issue of the journal Breast Cancer Research.

They suggest that it may be brought about the way coffee was prepared or perhaps the kind of bean used. It is dubious that the protective effect may be due to the phytoestrogens inside the coffee because there was no significant decrease in the incident rate of ER-positive cancer in the study.

The researchers believe that the approach by which coffee may protect a person against cancer and the components involved is still unclear.

What Shumin Zhang of Harvard Medical School firmly believes is that consuming coffee does not increase the risk of getting breast cancer. Hal and his colleagues gathered and analyzed the data for this study with 2,818 individuals diagnosed with breast cancer and 3,111 with no breast cancer. The study includes women in age between 50 to 74 years old.

What is more is that, the researchers assessed their coffee consumption. They also included other lifestyle factors like the family history of breast cancer, exercise habits, education, menopausal age and weight.

Breast cancer Medicine Breast cancer Coffee