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Study links smoking, drinking, tea to cancer
We knows about the stogies and booze... but grean tea? Whoa...Men who smoke and drink daily are nine to 11 times more likely to get cancer of the esophagus, according to a new Tohoku University study. Yah, we know about these... Surprisingly, drinking several cups of green tea a day also increased the risk of that cancer, the study found. Damn. Sorry, tw. But the higher risk of cancer was most noticeable among smokers. Roughly 70 percent of the men could have avoided esophageal cancer by quitting smoking, the researchers calculated. "Esophageal cancer is representative of a cancer that can be prevented through a change in daily habits," said Tohoku University's Shinichi Kuriyama, who oversaw the research study. "The most important thing is to quit smoking. The worst situation is smoking while drinking alcohol." The project was led by Atsunobu Ishikawa at the Department of Public Health and Forensic Medicine at Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine. It followed about 27,000 men in two studies: one that began in 1984 of 9,000 men over 40 in Miyagi Prefecture, and another that started in 1990 with 18,000 men in the same age group. The subjects were asked about their diet and daily habits. The first group was followed for nine years, the second for seven years and seven months. Of all the subjects, 78 men eventually developed esophageal cancer. The researchers measured the cancer rate against three habits--smoking, drinking alcohol and drinking green tea. Smokers were about five times more likely than non-smokers to develop esophageal cancer. Those who drank alcohol almost daily had a 2.7-fold greater risk than those who drank only rarely. In addition, men who drank more than five cups of green tea a day had a 1.7-fold greater risk of cancer than those who did not. That might be because the men drank the tea while it was still very hot, the researchers speculated. Experts believe drinking hot liquids increases the risk of developing esophageal cancer. An earlier study by the same team found that green tea helps reduce the mortality rate for cardiovascular disease. Okay, so if I toss the smokes, shitcan the alky, and cool my tea... I just invented iced tea! Woohoo! The team also calculated the risk of a combination of the three habits. Those who neither smoked nor regularly drank alcohol or green tea were given a base risk of 1. Smoking and drinking alcohol increased the risk of getting esophageal cancer to 9.2 times; adding more than three daily cups of green tea into the mix pushed it up to 11.1 times. Posted by: .com 2006-11-21 |
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