American researchers: drinking coffee combined with exercise can prevent skin cancer

Coffee drinking combined with regular exercise could prevent skin cancer by destroying cells damaged by ultraviolet rays from the sun, a trial reported Monday.

Researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey say laboratory studies in mice have found that coffee combined with exercise has a fourfold stronger effect on apoptosis in precancerous cells. Apoptosis refers to spontaneous cell death.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences on Wednesday.

Researchers at rutgers university compared hairless mice who drank water containing the equivalent of one or two cups of caffeine a day and exercised by pedaling a wheel with a control group that drank no coffee at all or exercised at all.

The experiment found a 95 percent increase in apoptosis in mice that drank coffee alone, a 120 percent increase in mice that exercised alone, and an almost 400 percent increase in mice that drank coffee and exercised.

"The UV-induced apoptotic cells varied significantly between groups," said Coney, one of the study's authors. This type of apoptotic cell is the abnormal cells that lead to skin cancer.

Sunlight-induced skin cancer is very common in the United States, with more than 1 million new cases occurring each year, according to the National Cancer Institute.