Common coffee and tea habit linked to higher risk of specific type of cancer

Regularly drinking very hot tea or coffee may raise the risk of a type of esophageal cancer, according to a large study at the University of Oxford.People who reported drinking beverages “very hot” had about three times the risk of developing oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), a type of cancer that begins in the cells lining the esophagus, compared to those who drank warm beverages.Drinking six or more hot drinks per day was associated with a 71% higher risk of the disease.The same link was not seen for esophageal adenocarcinoma (AC), a type of cancer that develops in the lower part of the esophagus.The study included nearly 1 million U.K.

adults, making it the largest investigation of its kind to date, according to lead study author Keren Papier, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Oxford.Roughly half of the participants were from the Million Women Study (MWS), who were followed for an average of 14 years, and the other half were from the UK Biobank (UKB), who were followed for 11 years.“Compared with people who reported drinking their beverages ‘warm,’ those who drank them ‘hot’ had around a 1.7 times higher risk of SCC, while those who drank them ‘very hot’ had around a three times higher risk,” Papier told Fox News Digital.The study was published in the International Journal of Cancer.The researchers estimated that, if the observed association reflects a true cause-and-effect relationship, about 14% of SCC cases could potentially be prevented if people drank beverages “hot” rather than “very hot.”The biggest limitation, according to the researchers, is that beverage temperatures were self-reported rather than directly measured.Because people’s tolerance for heat differs, participants may have classified similar temperatures differently.“A limitation of our study was that, although we examined associations by self-reported preferred drink temperature, we did not have data on directly measured drink temper...