A NEW study of nearly one million people has found new evidence to suggest that drinking scalding hot coffees and teas could significantly increase a person’s risk of getting cancer in their esophagus.
According to a BBC report, drinking these beverages very hot, rather than warm, is associated with a three-fold risk of esophageal cancer, according to the study, conducted in the United Kingdom (UK) and published recently in the International Journal of Cancer.
The finding applies specifically to esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), the most common form of esophageal cancer worldwide.
The esophagus, also known as the food pipe, is a muscular tube that passes food and drink from your mouth to your stomach.
Globally, there were about 604,000 new cases of esophageal cancer and about 544,000 deaths from esophageal cancer in 2020, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) cancer agency.
The agency estimates that global cases will rise by more than 50 per cent, to almost a million new cases a year by 2040.
In the UK, there are around 9,500 new cases each year, according to Cancer Research UK. However, an estimated 14 per cent of new esophageal SCC cases in the country could be avoided if individuals drank their teas and coffees at lower temperatures, the researchers from the UK’s University of Oxford said in the study, which is the largest of its kind.
The researchers analysed data from nearly 980,000 middle-aged adults in the UK who were asked questions about their hot drink consumption habits, including whether they preferred their drinks “very hot,” “hot” or “warm,” or if they “do not drink hot drinks” or “prefer not to answer.”
They were also asked how many hot drinks they consumed each day, with the option to choose “fewer than six hot drinks per day” or “six or more hot drinks per day.”
All the participants were from two large cohorts, the Million Women Study and UK Biobank, which both routinely log participants’ health information.
Across the cohorts, 2,348 incidents of esophageal cancer occurred during an average follow-up period of 14.2 years and 11.1 years, respectively.
The researchers found that just under half of the participants reported consuming six or more hot drinks per day, and approximately 15 per cent said they preferred their drinks very hot.
The risk of esophageal SCC increased with the preferred drink temperature, with those who liked their drinks hot having almost twice the cancer risk of those who preferred them warm. For those who liked their drinks very hot, the risk was over three-fold.
The number of drinks consumed also mattered. After the researchers controlled for temperature, they found that drinking six or more hot drinks a day, compared with fewer than six, was associated with a 71 per cent higher risk of esophageal SCC.
