According to a new study, drinking six or more cups of coffee per day can lower a man's risk of fatal prostate cancer by up to 60 percent.
A decreased risk of cancer was seen in men regardless of whether they drank decaf or caffeinated, which suggests that the benefit may come from a property in coffee other than caffeine, researchers say.
"Coffee has a lot of different biological effects and several of them seem like they might be relevant for prostate cancer," says the lead author of the study, Kathryn Wilson, a research fellow in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston, Massachusetts.
Coffee also appears to influence levels of testosterone and other sex hormones, which "clearly play a role in prostate cancer," Wilson adds.
The potentially beneficial effects of coffee have received a slew of attention from researchers in recent years. Coffee consumption has been linked to a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and liver cancer, among other conditions, and just last week, researchers in Sweden reported that women who drank at least five cups a day were at lower risk of developing a certain aggressive type of breast cancer.
Researchers have previously explored a possible link between coffee and prostate cancer, but those studies have had mixed results and tended to be small.
The new study, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the largest of its kind, involving about 48,000 men.
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