Good coffee news: Drink helps prevent skin cancer and heart failure

Java lovers drink up! Two separate studies released today have found that those who drink coffee have a lower risk of developing the most common kind of skin cancer – basal cell carcinoma – and also have a lower risk of heart failure.

The new skin cancer study out of Harvard indicated that decaf coffee did not have the same effect, so researchers attribute the benefit to caffeine. The findings were consistent with published mouse data, which indicate caffeine can block skin tumor formation.

Basal cell carcinoma is the most common form of skin cancer in the United States. “Given the large number of cases, daily dietary changes having any protective effect may have an impact on public health,” said Jiali Han, associate professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston, and author of the study published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Neither coffee nor caffeine consumption were associated with reduced risk of the other forms of skin cancer: squamous cell carcinoma and melanoma.

Han and his colleagues generated their results by looking at data from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, two large long-running studies.

Of the 112,897 participants in the analyses, 22,786 developed basal cell carcinoma during the more than 20 years of follow-up. Researchers observed an inverse association between not only coffee consumption and risk of basal cell carcinoma, but also all dietary sources of caffeine — including tea, cola and chocolate – and the cancer.

“Our results add basal cell carcinoma to a list of conditions for which risk is decreased with increasing coffee consumption,” said Han.

Those other conditions include type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and now heart failure.

A separate study also released today from the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation Heart Failure reported that moderate coffee consumption reduced that deadly condition.

“While there is a commonly held belief that regular coffee consumption may be dangerous to heart health, our research suggests that the opposite may be true,” said Dr. Murray Mittleman, senior study author and director of the cardiovascular epidemiology research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.