Coffee consumption and the risk of incident gastric cancer—A meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies

ABSTRACTAs several epidemiological studies on the association of coffee consumption with gastric cancer risk have produced inconsistent results, this meta-analysis was designed to synthesize current evidence of this potential relationship. We searched PubMed, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library up to September 2014 to retrieve relevant articles. Prospective cohort studies were included if the relative risks (RRs) or hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for gastric cancer according to coffee consumption were reported. Fixed- or random-effects models were used based on heterogeneity. The search yielded 13 eligible cohort studies of 3484 incident gastric cancer patients from among 1,324,559 participants. A significantly increased risk was found between gastric cardia cancer and coffee consumption (RR = 1.50, 95% CI: 1.09–2.07). Compared with Europeans (RR = 1.12, 95% CI: 0.86–1.46) and Asians (RR = 0.96, 95% CI: 0.72–1.27), Americans (RR = 1.36, 95% CI: 1.06–1.74) demonstrated a significantly positi...