Coffee Consumption and Its Inverse Relationship with Gastric Cancer: An Ecological Study

Abstract

Coffee is the second most popular drink worldwide, and it has various components with antioxidant and antitumor properties. Due to its chemical composition, it could act as an antitumor substance in the gastrointestinal tract. The objective of this study was to explore the relationship between coffee consumption and the incidence/mortality of stomach cancer in the highest-consuming countries. An ecological study using Spearman’s correlation coefficient was performed. The WorldAtlas’s dataset of coffee consumption and the incidence/mortality rates database of the International Agency for Research were used as sources of information. A total of 25 countries were entered to the study. There was an inverse linear correlation between coffee consumption in kg per person per year and estimated age-adjusted incidence (r = −0.5984, p = 0.0016) and mortality (r = −0.5877, p = 0.0020) of stomach cancer. Coffee may potentially have beneficial effects on the incidence and mortality of stomach cancer, as supported by the data from each country analyzed.

Keywords

• coffee
• antioxidants
• stomach neoplasms
• mortality
• observational study