DON’T FORGET TO get your five a day – five cups of coffee that is.

According to new research from Sweden, women who indulge in five or more cups of brew each day are less likely to develop a certain type of breast cancer.

The chances of a person developing a form of breast cancer known as “oestrogen receptor-negative” decreases by 57 per cent if coffee intake is equal to five cups a day or more, according to researchers at the Karolinska Institute. The study, which involved almost 6,000 women, also found that female coffee drinkers in general had “modest decrease in overall breast cancer risk” in comparison with those who abstained.

The study group included post-menopausal women aged between 50 and 74 . Of the women involved, 2,818 had confirmed cases of breast cancer and 3,111 were control subjects. While researchers found that drinking coffee had no benefit to the oestrogen receptor-positive form of cancer, they discovered that it did have a beneficial impact on the receptor-negative form.

The BBC reports that around one-in-four women diagnosed with breast cancer will have oestrogen-receptor negative breast cancer. Research Professor Per Hall said that the results of the study had been surprising, and added that researchers did not know why coffee might have this effect: “We just don’t know what might be behind this association,” he said, “There are so many different compounds in coffee that it could be any one of them that could be having an effect”.

Hall cautioned that too much coffee can have unwanted side-effects and that he would not advise women to increase their coffee consumption until more research had been conducted.

The study was published in BioMed Central’s open access peer-reviewed journal Breast Cancer Research.