Hot Coffee Could Cause Oesophageal Cancer (Economist)

Summary

The capture holds only the opening paragraph: a study published on 8 September 2026 in the International Journal of Cancer "adds to a growing body of evidence that drinking very hot beverages of any kind increases the risk of cancer of the oesophagus". The rest of this page is built from the study itself — Papier, Gaitskell, Floud and Reeves (University of Oxford), Hot Drinks and Oesophageal Cancer: Prospective Analyses in Around 1 Million UK Adults, Int J Cancer 2026;159(12):2877–2885, PubMed 42710538 — and secondary coverage (Medical Xpress, News-Medical).

The study

• Design: prospective cohort, pooling the Million Women Study (n = 510,112) and UK Biobank (n = 467,170) — 977,282 UK adults. Self-reported usual tea/coffee temperature (warm, hot, very hot) and cups per day, linked to NHS cancer records.
• Follow-up: average 14.2 years (MWS) and 11.1 years (UKB).
• Outcomes: 2,348 incident oesophageal cancers — 1,045 squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and 1,303 adenocarcinoma (AC).
• Adjustments: smoking, alcohol, body weight; temperature and frequency mutually adjusted.

Key findings

• Hot vs warm carried an intermediate, smaller increase in SCC risk; the abstract reports a clear trend across the three categories rather than a separate HR.
• Associations were similar for tea and coffee, which the authors read as pointing at temperature, not the drink; they held among never-smokers and light drinkers, and adding milk did not explain them.
• The authors estimate that if the association is causal, ~14% of UK SCC cases (~440 a year) could be avoided if very hot drinkers switched to hot; drinking well below the population average temperature could prevent more.

Context the article leans on

• IARC (2016) classified drinking very hot beverages (above 65°C) as probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A), based on studies from South America, Asia and Africa where maté and tea are drunk at ~70°C or hotter. Tea and coffee in the UK and US are typically drunk at around 60°C, so this is the first large Western-population confirmation.
• Earlier Western evidence was mixed: a 2001 Swedish case-control study found no increased risk from very hot beverages.

Flagged as unproven

• Temperature is self-reported in three categories, never measured, so the study cannot name a threshold temperature.
• Observational: residual confounding is possible despite adjustment; the 14% figure assumes causality.
• The mechanism (repeated thermal injury to the oesophageal lining) is inferred from the SCC-only pattern, not demonstrated here.
• Applies to oesophageal SCC only; no link to adenocarcinoma, the more common subtype in Western countries.

Connections

• Hot Beverages and Oesophageal Cancer — concept page.
• The Economist

Captured-by trigger

Source file: raw/processed/Economist 2026-09-19 Science---Techn - Hot coffee could cause oesophageal cancer.md (lede only; study identified and read via PubMed).