Caffeine Offers Skin Cancer Protection

Filed in archive Food and Agriculture on February 27, 2009

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Image# 6660710

In a study published this week in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, researchers investigated the mechanism by which caffeine may confer protection against skin cancer.

For the study, Nghiem's team looked at caffeine's effect on human skin cells in a laboratory that had been exposed to ultraviolet radiation. They found that in cells damaged by UV rays, caffeine interrupted a protein called ATR-Chk1, causing the damaged cells to self-destruct.

"Caffeine has no effect on undamaged cells," Nghiem said.

ATR is essential to damaged cells that are growing rapidly, Nghiem said, and caffeine specifically targets damaged cells that can become cancerous. "Caffeine more than doubles the number of damaged cells that will die normally after a given dose of UV," he said.

"This is a biological mechanism that explains what we have been seeing for many years from the oral intake of caffeine," he added.

Rather than an increase in caffeine intake, the authors suggest that caffeine-containing sunscreen preparations for topical application may be more sensible.