A number of studies have shown that coffee helps to protect against breast cancer and new work led by Lund University has found that it also inhibits the growth of tumors and reduces risk of recurrence in women who have been treated with the drug tamoxifen.
In the cell study, the researchers looked more closely at two substances that usually occur in the coffee drunk in Sweden – caffeine and caffeic acid - and is a follow-up of the results the researchers obtained two years ago.
“Now, unlike in the previous study, we have combined information about the patients’ lifestyle and clinical data from 1,090 breast cancer patients with studies on breast cancer cells. The study shows that among the over 500 women treated with tamoxifen, those who had drunk at least two cups of coffee a day had only half the risk of recurrence of those who drank less coffee or none at all,” explain Lund researchers Ann Rosendahl and Helena Jernström, who obtained the results in collaboration with