Drinking Coffee Reduces Colorectal Cancer Recurrence

A new study found that people with bowel cancer, also known as colorectal cancer, who drink two to four cups of coffee a day can reduce their risk of disease recurrence. The effect was determined to be dose dependent, with those who drank the most coffee seeing their risk fall even further.

For example, people who drank five cups of coffee or more were 32% less likely than those who drank two cups or fewer to see their cancer return, according to the paper that was published in the International Journal of Cancer.

According to The Guardian, mortality rates also improved with coffee consumption. The study that involved 1,710 colorectal cancer patients in the Netherlands found that those who drank at least two cups of coffee daily had a lower risk of dying compared with those who didn’t. And those who drank five cups or more saw their risk of dying fall by 29%.

The research team leader, Ellen Kampman, a nutritional epidemiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, whose work focuses on the role of lifestyle in cancer prevention, says that bowel cancer returns in one in five people diagnosed with the disease, and it can be fatal.

“It’s intriguing that this study suggests drinking three to four cups of coffee may reduce the recurrence of bowel cancer,” she said. She emphasized that the study revealed an association between bowel cancer and coffee consumption, and not a causal effect. Marc Gunter, a co-author of the study from the Imperial College of London, said the findings were “very provocative as we don’t really understand why coffee would have such an effect in bowel cancer patients.”

Gunter added that the results are also promising as they may provide a way to improve prognosis and survival among these patients. He said that coffee contains many biologically active agents that may offer protection against colorectal cancer.

“Coffee also lowers inflammation and insulin levels — which have been linked to bowel cancer development and progression — and can have potentially beneficial effects on the gut microbiome. However, we need to do more research to go more deeply into the biology of why coffee might have such an effect on bowel cancer prognosis and survival,” he said.

In the United States, colorectal cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men and the fourth leading cause in women, says Cancer.org. It’s the second most common cause of cancer deaths when numbers for men and woman are combined and is expected to cause 53,010 deaths in 2024.

While the death rate from colorectal cancer has been dropping in older adults for decades thanks to screening and improved treatments, in people under the age of 55 death rates have been increasing by 1% per year since the mid-2000s.