5 ms·

Higher coffee intake may be linked to lower prostate cancer risk

39 points by rustoo 6y ago

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
What is the value of such weak claims, other than possibly stimulating a research entity to execute a rigorous experiment? Or as marketing fluff for companies that would benefit from making such claims? Or confirmation bias for those of us who suspect we drink too much coffee? Words like 'may be' (the information is not conclusive) and 'linked' (we don't know if it's causal) make this (in my view) un-newsworthy.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I agree, and that seems to be the majority of science-related content here on HN.
- totalZero 6y ago
  Publication, future citations, and career advancement.
- boplicity 6y ago
  There is an important role for research that sets up further research. Without these exploratory studies, it is difficult to determine where to make a larger investment in a more rigorous study. You'll note that most papers are rather explicit about this, though this is often underplayed by journalists. The article does say this: > Further research is still warranted to explore the underlying mechanisms and active compounds in coffee. > If the association is further proved to be a causal effect, men might be encouraged to increase their coffee consumption to potentially decrease the risk of prostate cancer.”
  - pxhb 6y ago
    Exactly this. Science/research is largely incremental.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- rand_r 6y ago
  Despite us knowing that correlation does not equal causation for forever, these weak studies keep getting funded and popping up. The only finding you could make with such a study is to disprove something. If the hypothesis was that coffee prevented cancer, and you found no correlation between coffee and cancer, then that would _disprove_ the claim. I understand the common person being sucked into these alluring study titles, but it's disappointing that scientists keep producing this kind of empty work.
  - notJim 6y ago
    I would guess they crop up repeatedly because they are cheap to fund. Fewer funders who want to put a bunch of money and time into a long, expensive study that may produce nothing. Instead fund 10 cheap studies that might produce a headline :(
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    I try not to shun incremental research because I understand there is value in it. Unfortunately, a large portion of it is frankly very uninteresting and these 'may be' sort of weak links are a necessity to continue research and progress by appeasing the purseholders. Often these sort of results are picked up by journalists and overemphasized but there are inherent pressures for researchers, their supervisors, and everything up the finance food chain to do the same sort of marketing as well. You have to make sure the people who pay the bills have some sort of progress report that shows improvement and ROI. The current way of coping with this pressure is showing small promising incremental updates on low risk studies regularly and then doing the interesting research with any slack time you have to hopefully discover the next real breakthrough or leap. Breakthroughs are often non-incremental and are the real allure of research and science, at least to me. Unfortunately, society doesn't like seeing big risks taken, resources spent, and little to show beyond the, still quite valuable, knowledge of "this didn't work." The vast majority of researchers hate small incremental research and much prefer to use their creativity to take larger incremental leaps or even paradigm/perspective shifting leaps. If we want to stay ahead of the world in terms of research we need to be willing to take bigger risks and accept failure on those risks. Scientific progress is largely at the mercy of the business and economic culture it's conducted within.
- breck 6y ago
  Shut up and let me enjoy my sixth cup of coffee. ;) Sadly we have to suffer with articles like this until the coming paradigm shift to better publishers.
milsorgen 6y ago
I've been wondering lately whether decaf provides any of the supposed health benefits that some have attributed to regular coffee.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  I've wondered the same, and personally, I'm just assuming the health benefits come from B vitamins, antioxidants, etc, which would suggest decaf should also be beneficial.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Heck the benefit may come simply from the fact that the alternative to coffee for many people is soda pop.
    - CarelessExpert 6y ago
      Fantastic point, that's certainly the role it's played in my life!
- scythe 6y ago
  In at least some cases, the answer appears to be "yes": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197018612000551?casa_token=qba8KW9MdKAAAAAA:ynXQnDPPprUeFnWdR0-n4cQ3qgF7F4F0RK2_HG4kLQmckLMYh4voL8XQ9K9Y6kk12WFMA8Nf2uw https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019701861... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1550384?casa_token=g8aNFbx27_YAAAAA%3ApWWGf_hPpVF0xJAho-JH4r0GRzNs854aXZwS0-ciEJr0SkIJOyhHeGGcTMCqHtSF2nBH6ku6lFO50w https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1... But not in all cases: https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad091249 https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-...
- ttul 6y ago
  There are antioxidants in coffee, which I have read previously are suggested as potentially reducing cancer risk by mopping up oxidative molecules in your body. When it comes to the colon cancer risk reduction, caffeine may have a role by increasing the rate at which food moves through the intestines, basically washing out waste faster that would otherwise interact with the cells in the lining of the colon to cause cancer.
philsnow 6y ago
> Each additional daily cup of the brew was associated with a reduction in relative risk of nearly 1%, the findings indicate. This feels like a reference to that Futurama episode where Fry drinks 100 cups of coffee https://imgur.com/gallery/uoKqLRm https://imgur.com/gallery/uoKqLRm
irrational 6y ago
Basically every single medical submission is shot down as shoddy research. Maybe we need a separate site than Hacker News for medical research stories?
- xwdv 6y ago
  Why? The research will continue to be shoddy no matter where it’s posted.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  There is a lot of shoddy medical research. Particularly when it comes to supplements, food intake, etc. You have to realize that there are a lot of vested interests. The coffee industry is massive, and they would have you believe that coffee is a panacea. The first question to ask is: who funded this research?
fortran77 6y ago
My father, who died in 2014 from Metastatic Prostate Cancer, would always nag me and tell me I drank too much coffee! That being said, the connection here seems weak. Still, I won't feel bad about my coffee habit.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  Tangent, but I'm sorry about your father.
ipnon 6y ago
We know frequent ejaculation lowers prostate cancer risk,[0] and heightened stress levels increases how attractive we perceive others to be.[1] Could coffee be inducing stress that leads to increased sexual activity? [0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/ejaculation_frequency_and_prostate_cancer https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/ejaculation_frequ... [1] https://www.fpce.uc.pt/niips/novoplano/ps1/documentos/dutton&aron1974.pdf https://www.fpce.uc.pt/niips/novoplano/ps1/documentos/dutton...
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  Who is "we"? If you had maybe five other studies replicating that second result about stress and sexuality from the past 20 years, I might find it credible. I don't find one study on this topic from 1974 credible enough to believe it.
  - ipnon 6y ago
    It's an offhand suggestive hypothesis made in good faith on an open message board to spur debate.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
rvba 6y ago
Here's a way to interpret data: Chad drinks 0 coffees per day - he is a surfing instructor and has sex with a different girl every day. Sooner or later he gets some virus that causes cancer. Bob, the computer programmer, has a stressful job and drinks 10 coffees per day. No sex. This means no human papiloma virus that later causes prostate cancer. Does coffee have anything to do with HPV? Not really..
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
The study doesn't mention caffeine, but I'm curious if it's a factor. Caffeinated drinks make me need to pee more often than non-caffeinated drinks. I'm curious if that reduces the amount of time that the bladder cells are exposed to oxidative stress from urine.
- domnomnom 6y ago
  Here are a couple of papers about supposed mechanisms: Regarding caffeine: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16709440/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16709440/ Regarding coffee polyphenols: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16709440/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16709440/
dgellow 6y ago
At this point I don’t know what isn’t linked to coffee
fractionalhare 6y ago
> Each additional daily cup associated with reduction in risk of nearly 1% lol. okay. This presents the relationship as if it's a linear function without an upper bound or diminishing return, which seems suspect. I doubt that. [1] More holistically speaking, let's approach this with some skepticism. Did they control for wealth? Is coffee predominantly consumed by people with better access to healthcare and who can afford better medical treatment? A priori, I would believe that is generally the case. Maybe they should specifically study the relationship between coffee consumption and prostate cancer in relatively lower income populations that still drink a lot of it, like truckers. __________ 1. Though I would believe their analysis technically indicates it, especially if they only did the bare minimum of statistical work and simply tested for a linear relationship...
- deeviant 6y ago
  Countless studies have shown coffee consumption to be beneficial to human health, often topping out at some ridiculous amount of consumption (i.e. benefits go right up to 6-8 cups/day), including the many studies that look at what I myself really care about, all cause mortality. At some point "skepticism" becomes denial. Here is an example study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31055709/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31055709/. I could link them all day. Key except: "An inverse association between coffee consumption and all-cause mortality was maintained irrespective of age, overweight status, alcohol drinking, smoking status, and caffeine content of coffee." Most studies do in fact attempt to control for the types of factors you mention.
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    Did this particular study control for that, is what I asked, because this particular study is what's on the front page of HN. Also, "countless" studies have shown negative correlations between coffee and human health. [1] So which is it? Oh no, it looks like coffee is also positively linked with coronary heart disease and Parkinson's! This is an area which benefits from more skepticism. Don't write off skepticism in an area filled with reproducibility issues and bad statistics as "denial". 1. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=coffee+disease&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=cof...
Sn0wCoder 6y ago
Good. One of the more common types of cancer, although next week it will be the #3 cause https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/prostate-cancer/symptoms-causes/syc-20353087 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/prostate-canc...
drzoltar 6y ago
I recently downloaded my Ancestry.com DNA data, and started looking at it with the help of SNPedia: https://www.SNPedia.com https://www.SNPedia.com One of the neat things I found is that I have genetic markers for increased coffee consumption: https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Coffee https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Coffee I drink at least a few cups a day and so does my dad, so confirmation bias does the rest. That makes me wonder if drinking coffee (amoungst other foods) is truly causal in decreasing prostate cancer, as opposed to heavy coffee drinkers having other correlated biomarkers (in particular ethnic correlations) that help dodge it. Anyways, I’m not trying to disparage this study, I just think it’s neat that we’re somewhat predisposed to like certain foods from birth.
- shock 6y ago
  How are you identifying your genetic variants in the DNA data? I'm still learning how to do that, so any pointers are appreciated.
  - drzoltar 6y ago
    SNPedia has a paid service that can do it for you: https://promethease.com/ https://promethease.com/ I personally didn’t trust them with my data so instead you can just search for specific SNPs from your DNA file. For example, the coffee one is this one: https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs2472297 https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs2472297 So you search your dna file for rs2472297 and then check which combination you have, e.g., you see “C T” which is slightly associated with coffee consumption. You can probably write or find a script that does this for you.
senectus1 6y ago
I used to drink approx 5 cups of black a day... but now it messes with my digestive processes. I'm off coffee completely. Black Tea works just fine for caffeine.

39 points by rustoo 6y ago

What is the value of such weak claims, other than possibly stimulating a research entity to execute a rigorous experiment? Or as marketing fluff for companies that would benefit from making such claims? Or confirmation bias for those of us who suspect we drink too much coffee? Words like 'may be' (the information is not conclusive) and 'linked' (we don't know if it's causal) make this (in my view) un-newsworthy.

throwaway894345 6y ago
I agree, and that seems to be the majority of science-related content here on HN.
totalZero 6y ago
Publication, future citations, and career advancement.
boplicity 6y ago
There is an important role for research that sets up further research. Without these exploratory studies, it is difficult to determine where to make a larger investment in a more rigorous study. You'll note that most papers are rather explicit about this, though this is often underplayed by journalists. The article does say this: > Further research is still warranted to explore the underlying mechanisms and active compounds in coffee. > If the association is further proved to be a causal effect, men might be encouraged to increase their coffee consumption to potentially decrease the risk of prostate cancer.”
- pxhb 6y ago
  Exactly this. Science/research is largely incremental.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
rand_r 6y ago
Despite us knowing that correlation does not equal causation for forever, these weak studies keep getting funded and popping up. The only finding you could make with such a study is to disprove something. If the hypothesis was that coffee prevented cancer, and you found no correlation between coffee and cancer, then that would _disprove_ the claim. I understand the common person being sucked into these alluring study titles, but it's disappointing that scientists keep producing this kind of empty work.
- notJim 6y ago
  I would guess they crop up repeatedly because they are cheap to fund. Fewer funders who want to put a bunch of money and time into a long, expensive study that may produce nothing. Instead fund 10 cheap studies that might produce a headline :(
- Frost1x 6y ago
  I try not to shun incremental research because I understand there is value in it. Unfortunately, a large portion of it is frankly very uninteresting and these 'may be' sort of weak links are a necessity to continue research and progress by appeasing the purseholders. Often these sort of results are picked up by journalists and overemphasized but there are inherent pressures for researchers, their supervisors, and everything up the finance food chain to do the same sort of marketing as well. You have to make sure the people who pay the bills have some sort of progress report that shows improvement and ROI. The current way of coping with this pressure is showing small promising incremental updates on low risk studies regularly and then doing the interesting research with any slack time you have to hopefully discover the next real breakthrough or leap. Breakthroughs are often non-incremental and are the real allure of research and science, at least to me. Unfortunately, society doesn't like seeing big risks taken, resources spent, and little to show beyond the, still quite valuable, knowledge of "this didn't work." The vast majority of researchers hate small incremental research and much prefer to use their creativity to take larger incremental leaps or even paradigm/perspective shifting leaps. If we want to stay ahead of the world in terms of research we need to be willing to take bigger risks and accept failure on those risks. Scientific progress is largely at the mercy of the business and economic culture it's conducted within.
breck 6y ago
Shut up and let me enjoy my sixth cup of coffee. ;) Sadly we have to suffer with articles like this until the coming paradigm shift to better publishers.

milsorgen 6y ago

I've been wondering lately whether decaf provides any of the supposed health benefits that some have attributed to regular coffee.

CarelessExpert 6y ago
I've wondered the same, and personally, I'm just assuming the health benefits come from B vitamins, antioxidants, etc, which would suggest decaf should also be beneficial.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Heck the benefit may come simply from the fact that the alternative to coffee for many people is soda pop.
  - CarelessExpert 6y ago
    Fantastic point, that's certainly the role it's played in my life!
scythe 6y ago
In at least some cases, the answer appears to be "yes": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197018612000551?casa_token=qba8KW9MdKAAAAAA:ynXQnDPPprUeFnWdR0-n4cQ3qgF7F4F0RK2_HG4kLQmckLMYh4voL8XQ9K9Y6kk12WFMA8Nf2uw https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019701861... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1550384?casa_token=g8aNFbx27_YAAAAA%3ApWWGf_hPpVF0xJAho-JH4r0GRzNs854aXZwS0-ciEJr0SkIJOyhHeGGcTMCqHtSF2nBH6ku6lFO50w https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1... But not in all cases: https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad091249 https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-...
ttul 6y ago
There are antioxidants in coffee, which I have read previously are suggested as potentially reducing cancer risk by mopping up oxidative molecules in your body. When it comes to the colon cancer risk reduction, caffeine may have a role by increasing the rate at which food moves through the intestines, basically washing out waste faster that would otherwise interact with the cells in the lining of the colon to cause cancer.

philsnow 6y ago

> Each additional daily cup of the brew was associated with a reduction in relative risk of nearly 1%, the findings indicate. This feels like a reference to that Futurama episode where Fry drinks 100 cups of coffee https://imgur.com/gallery/uoKqLRm https://imgur.com/gallery/uoKqLRm

irrational 6y ago

Basically every single medical submission is shot down as shoddy research. Maybe we need a separate site than Hacker News for medical research stories?

xwdv 6y ago
Why? The research will continue to be shoddy no matter where it’s posted.
tachyonbeam 6y ago
There is a lot of shoddy medical research. Particularly when it comes to supplements, food intake, etc. You have to realize that there are a lot of vested interests. The coffee industry is massive, and they would have you believe that coffee is a panacea. The first question to ask is: who funded this research?

fortran77 6y ago

My father, who died in 2014 from Metastatic Prostate Cancer, would always nag me and tell me I drank too much coffee! That being said, the connection here seems weak. Still, I won't feel bad about my coffee habit.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
Tangent, but I'm sorry about your father.

ipnon 6y ago

We know frequent ejaculation lowers prostate cancer risk,[0] and heightened stress levels increases how attractive we perceive others to be.[1] Could coffee be inducing stress that leads to increased sexual activity? [0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/ejaculation_frequency_and_prostate_cancer https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/ejaculation_frequ... [1] https://www.fpce.uc.pt/niips/novoplano/ps1/documentos/dutton&aron1974.pdf https://www.fpce.uc.pt/niips/novoplano/ps1/documentos/dutton...

fractionalhare 6y ago
Who is "we"? If you had maybe five other studies replicating that second result about stress and sexuality from the past 20 years, I might find it credible. I don't find one study on this topic from 1974 credible enough to believe it.
- ipnon 6y ago
  It's an offhand suggestive hypothesis made in good faith on an open message board to spur debate.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

rvba 6y ago

Here's a way to interpret data: Chad drinks 0 coffees per day - he is a surfing instructor and has sex with a different girl every day. Sooner or later he gets some virus that causes cancer. Bob, the computer programmer, has a stressful job and drinks 10 coffees per day. No sex. This means no human papiloma virus that later causes prostate cancer. Does coffee have anything to do with HPV? Not really..

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago

The study doesn't mention caffeine, but I'm curious if it's a factor. Caffeinated drinks make me need to pee more often than non-caffeinated drinks. I'm curious if that reduces the amount of time that the bladder cells are exposed to oxidative stress from urine.

domnomnom 6y ago
Here are a couple of papers about supposed mechanisms: Regarding caffeine: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16709440/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16709440/ Regarding coffee polyphenols: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16709440/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16709440/

dgellow 6y ago

At this point I don’t know what isn’t linked to coffee

fractionalhare 6y ago

> Each additional daily cup associated with reduction in risk of nearly 1% lol. okay. This presents the relationship as if it's a linear function without an upper bound or diminishing return, which seems suspect. I doubt that. [1] More holistically speaking, let's approach this with some skepticism. Did they control for wealth? Is coffee predominantly consumed by people with better access to healthcare and who can afford better medical treatment? A priori, I would believe that is generally the case. Maybe they should specifically study the relationship between coffee consumption and prostate cancer in relatively lower income populations that still drink a lot of it, like truckers. __________ 1. Though I would believe their analysis technically indicates it, especially if they only did the bare minimum of statistical work and simply tested for a linear relationship...

deeviant 6y ago
Countless studies have shown coffee consumption to be beneficial to human health, often topping out at some ridiculous amount of consumption (i.e. benefits go right up to 6-8 cups/day), including the many studies that look at what I myself really care about, all cause mortality. At some point "skepticism" becomes denial. Here is an example study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31055709/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31055709/. I could link them all day. Key except: "An inverse association between coffee consumption and all-cause mortality was maintained irrespective of age, overweight status, alcohol drinking, smoking status, and caffeine content of coffee." Most studies do in fact attempt to control for the types of factors you mention.
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  Did this particular study control for that, is what I asked, because this particular study is what's on the front page of HN. Also, "countless" studies have shown negative correlations between coffee and human health. [1] So which is it? Oh no, it looks like coffee is also positively linked with coronary heart disease and Parkinson's! This is an area which benefits from more skepticism. Don't write off skepticism in an area filled with reproducibility issues and bad statistics as "denial". 1. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=coffee+disease&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=cof...

Sn0wCoder 6y ago

Good. One of the more common types of cancer, although next week it will be the #3 cause https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/prostate-cancer/symptoms-causes/syc-20353087 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/prostate-canc...

drzoltar 6y ago

I recently downloaded my Ancestry.com DNA data, and started looking at it with the help of SNPedia: https://www.SNPedia.com https://www.SNPedia.com One of the neat things I found is that I have genetic markers for increased coffee consumption: https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Coffee https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Coffee I drink at least a few cups a day and so does my dad, so confirmation bias does the rest. That makes me wonder if drinking coffee (amoungst other foods) is truly causal in decreasing prostate cancer, as opposed to heavy coffee drinkers having other correlated biomarkers (in particular ethnic correlations) that help dodge it. Anyways, I’m not trying to disparage this study, I just think it’s neat that we’re somewhat predisposed to like certain foods from birth.

shock 6y ago
How are you identifying your genetic variants in the DNA data? I'm still learning how to do that, so any pointers are appreciated.
- drzoltar 6y ago
  SNPedia has a paid service that can do it for you: https://promethease.com/ https://promethease.com/ I personally didn’t trust them with my data so instead you can just search for specific SNPs from your DNA file. For example, the coffee one is this one: https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs2472297 https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs2472297 So you search your dna file for rs2472297 and then check which combination you have, e.g., you see “C T” which is slightly associated with coffee consumption. You can probably write or find a script that does this for you.

senectus1 6y ago

I used to drink approx 5 cups of black a day... but now it messes with my digestive processes. I'm off coffee completely. Black Tea works just fine for caffeine.