SCIENCE / MEDICINE : Coffee, Cigarettes, Cancer Tie

Researchers are blaming the combination of cigarettes and coffee for an unusually high percentage of pancreatic cancer victims in a rural Southern California valley.

Cigarette smokers who gulped down three or more cups of regular coffee daily were four times more likely to get cancer as smokers who drank less coffee, the researchers said in a paper in the Western Journal of Medicine.

The report is the first to link the combined effects of heavy coffee drinking and cigarette smoking with pancreatic cancer. A 1981 Harvard University study found a somewhat weaker link between coffee and pancreatic cancer, but it did not study the effects of smoking.

“It is clearly another indictment of cigarettes and coffee,” said Cedric Garland, a co-author of the study and director of epidemiology at the University of California, San Diego, Cancer Center.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control co-financed the study, which looked into 30 deaths in the Imperial Valley between 1978 and 1980. Those deaths brought the area a rate 40% higher than normal for a rural area.

The study compared the 30 pancreatic cancer victims to 30 people who died of other causes in the Imperial Valley, an agricultural area east of San Diego.

It found that 24% of the cancer patients smoked more than two packs of cigarettes a day. Only 4% of the U.S. population smokes that much.

Nonsmokers who drank lots of coffee did not show increased cancer risk in the study. Cancer of the pancreas is the fourth leading cause of U.S. cancer deaths, claiming 26,300 Americans a year.