Tea drinking and risk for prostate cancer (in Scotland if nowhere else)

Back in the dim and distant past (i.e., the 1960s and 1970s), relatively high levels of tea consumption were common in most of the United Kingdom, and coffee was an uncommon substitute. This is certainly not so true today. However, ?
a study published recently in Nutrition and Cancer (by Shafique et al.) has been widely publicized in the British media because it found an association between high levels of tea consumption (up to?12 cups of tea per day) and risk for prostate cancer up to 37 years later among a cohort of > 6,000 men in Scotland.

Our friends at The Daily Mail (as usual) were prominent among those who promptly over-reacted to the data in the study results (?Men who drink lots of tea are far more likely to develop prostate cancer, researchers have warned? stated The Daily Mail, in a gross exaggeration of the data.)

Now let?s be clear to distinguish between the quality of the research and the quality of the media reporting.

This study has problems. It was never designed as a study to investigate the impact of tea drinking on risk for prostate cancer diagnosis (let alone prostate cancer death). It is severely flawed by the fact that the amounts of tea consumed by the participants?(and indeed all their other activities) were collected just once ? at the beginning of the study ? back in the recruitment period between 1970 and 1973. It therefore takes no account of the changes in behavior of the study participants between recruitment and the end of the study in 2007. And that?s just one of the many technical problems with this study.

All that the authors state in the?study is that men who?drank > 7?cups a day in 1970-73 were 50 percent more likely to?be diagnosed with?prostate cancer over a median follow-up of 28 years than those who drank 0-3 cups a day. To be specific,?6.4 percent?of those who drank the most tea developed prostate cancer during the study period, compared with 4.6 percent?of those who drank the least, so the absolute hazard ratio of heavy tea drinking on the probability of a prostate cancer diagnosis was very small indeed (even if it was statistically significant). Furthermore, they found no association whatsoever between tea intake and the incidence of?low- (Gleason score?< 7) or high-grade (Gleason score?8?10) prostate cancer.

For those who are interested in a detailed analysis of this study, we recommend this analysis on the web site of the UK?s National Health Service, which gives a thoughful (if slightly tongue in cheek) assessment of the study and the related media coverage.

What?s The ?New? Prostate Cancer InfoLink?s take on all of this? Frankly, this study is of dubious merit at best, and the media coverage (unsurprisingly) has been way out of proportion to the actual data. We doubt if there is a significant percentage of males remaining in the Western world who still drink anything close to 12 cups of tea a day anyway.

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Filed under: Diagnosis, Risk Tagged: | accuracy, media, risk, Scotland, tea

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