Coffee and Breast Cancer---New Findings Support More Consumption, Not Less

Coffee is good for you. More evidence is here. And this time it's aimed directly at women. A new study from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden shows that higher-than-normal coffee consumption significantly decreases the risk of ER-negative breast cancer.* This study, which was published as a provisional PDF in Breast Cancer Research on May 11, 2011, included almost 6,000 women, who were included in six different cancer registries in Sweden. Available information about the women, who were all between the ages of 50 and 74, included health status, lifestyle habits, and various other factors (like whether the women were taking hormone therapy) that needed to be factored into the analysis in order to make it valid. The study was well designed in that it was a population-based and case controlled. When the researchers compared women who drank 5 or more cups of coffee a day with those who drank one cup or less, they found a modest overall decrease (about 20%, with a trend tow