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Cancer

Background Information

Cancer in Europe

Cancer causes 20% of deaths in Europe¹. With more than 3 million new cases and 1.7 million deaths each year, cancer is the most important cause of death and morbidity in Europe after cardiovascular diseases¹. The most common cancers in Europe in 2008 were bowel, breast, lung and prostate cancers which together accounted for nearly 50% of all cancer cases².

Coffee and cancer risk

There has been an ongoing debate about the relationship between coffee consumption and cancer since the early 1970s, following a publication stating that coffee was positively associated with cancer³. The debate became a major topic in 1981, when two publications suggested that coffee caused pancreatic cancer. In 1990, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified coffee in Group 2B (possibly carcinogenic to humans), considering that there was limited evidence available at that time that coffee drinking was carcinogenic to the human urinary bladder, and that there was inadequate human evidence that coffee drinking was carcinogenic in the pancreas, ovary and other sites. Indeed chance, bias or confounding could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence.

Since then, over 500 epidemiologic studies originating in America, Europe and Japan have been devoted to the potential link between coffee drinking and the risk of developing cancer. Recent publications have performed comprehensive reviews of the data concerning coffee drinking and the risk of cancer at various sites^4-7.

A recent meta-analysis of 40 prospective cohort studies⁷, including over 2 million participants across Europe, North America and Asia, which assessed the association between coffee intake and cancer risk in humans quantitatively, found that coffee consumption was not associated with an increased risk of cancer. For some types of cancer, coffee intake was inversely associated with disease risk⁷. In addition, a large Japanese cohort study found no association between coffee consumption and increased risk of total cancer mortality⁸.