A cuppa a day keeps cancer at bay

Drinking a cup of coffee a day might make post-menopausal women less prone to skin cancer, says a US study.

Drinking a cup of coffee daily might reduce the risk of developing skin cancer, the findings of a study in the US suggest.

The long-term observational health study begun in the 1990s and investigated 77,000 white postmenopausal women in the US.

The women shared a lot of information about themselves, including how much coffee and tea they drank and whether they had ever been diagnosed with non-melanoma skin cancer - the most common type of skin cancer that occurs due to sun exposure.

The investigators considered factors including participants' smoking, drinking, age, body mass index (BMI) and whether the women lived in sunny regions or not when the study started.

After those adjustments, the researchers found that a daily cup of caffeinated coffee was associated with a five percent drop in the women's odds of reporting non-melanoma skin cancer, reported the online edition of health magazine WebMD.

Women who drank six cups of caffeinated coffee per day were 30 per cent less likely than other women to report non-melanoma skin cancer, the researchers said.

They, however, didn't have data on which women wore sunscreen or whether the women drank more or less coffee over the years.