Rutgers Study: More Evidence That Caffeine Lowers Risk Of Skin Cancer

Rutgers Study: More Evidence that Caffeine Lowers Risk of Skin Cancer

There might be a time when instead of just drinking that morning cup of coffee you lather it on your skin as a way ofpreventing harmful sun damage or skin cancer.

Allan Conney
Credit: ScienCentral, Inc.

Allan Conney, director of the Susan Lehman Cullman Laboratory for Cancer Research
A new Rutgers study strengthensthe theory that caffeine guards against certain skin cancers at the molecular level by inhibiting a protein enzyme in the skin, known as ATR. Scientists believe that based on what they have learnedstudying mice, caffeine applied directly to the skin might help prevent damaging ultraviolet light from causing skin cancer.

Prior research indicated that mice that were fed caffeinated water andexposed to lamps that generated UVB radiation that damaged the DNA in their skin cells were able to kill off a greater percentage of their badly damaged cells and reduce the risk of cells becomingcancerous.

“Although it is known that coffee drinking is associated with a decreased risk of non-melanoma skin cancer, there now needs to be studies to determine whether topical caffeine inhibitssunlight-induced skin cancer,” said Allan Conney, professor of Chemical Biology and director of the Susan Lehman Cullman Laboratory for Cancer Research at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy.

In thisnewly-published study in the Proceedings of the National Acacemy of Sciences, instead of inhibiting ATR with caffeinated water, Rutgers researchers, in collaboration with researchers from theUniversity of Washington, genetically modified and diminished the levels of ATR in one group of mice. The results: the genetically modified mice developed tumors more slowly than the unmodified mice, had 69percent fewer tumors than regular mice and developed four times fewer invasive tumors. When caffeine was topically applied to the regular mice, they had 72 percent fewer squamos cell carcinomas, a...