Coffee May Help Slow The Growth Of Prostate Cancer

It’s about time the men of the world finally caught a break. New research suggests that coffee may help prevent the growth of prostate cancer.

It seems like there’s a study coming out every month that finds a new benefit of coffee consumption, so much so that I had to check the Sprudge archives to see if we’d already written about this one (we haven’t). According to Medical News Today, this newest research comes out of the Kanazawa University Graduate School of Medical Science in Japan, who tested a variety of different compounds in coffee to see if they would have any effect on the growth of prostate cancer, which the CDC lists as “one of the leading causes of cancer death in men.”

Of the 1,000 nonvolatile and 1,500 volatile chemical compounds found in a single cup of coffee, the researches honed in on just two: kahweol acetate and cafestol, “hydrocarbons that naturally occur in Arabica coffee.” For their tests, the researchers began by dosing prostate cancer cells—ones “that were resistant to standard cancer drugs,” per the article—in a petri dish with kahweol acetate and cafestol, where they observed that the cancer cells grew at a less rapid rate. They then moved on to testing in mice, where 16 subjects were transplanted with the cancer cells and then placed into four different groups: no treatment, treated with just kahweol acetate, treated with just cafestol, and treated with both kahweol acetate and cafestol. The results, according to study leader Dr. Hiroaki Iwamoto, are promising:

We found that kahweol acetate and cafestol inhibited the growth of the cancer cells in mice, but the combination seemed to work synergistically, leading to a significantly slower tumor growth than in untreated mice.

Dr. Iwamoto adds:

After 11 days, the untreated tumors had grown by around [3.5] times the original volume (342 percent), whereas the tumors in the mice treated with both compounds had grown by around just over [1.5] (167 percent) times the original size.

But before you go butt-chugging a Wush Wush, the article is quick to note that this is just a pilot study and there is still much more research that needs to be done before any hard conclusions can be drawn. Dr. Iwamoto states that the test needs to be replicated with a larger sample before moving on to humans. Nonetheless, the results are positive, especially for those who already drink coffee and have prostates. So keep doing what you are doing, prostated coffee drinkers, you may be doing yourself a favor.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Top image © Monkey Business/Adobe Stock

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