Women who drink at least three cups of coffee a day might actually be cutting down their risk of dying from heart disease, a new study by researchers at the School of Medicine at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain suggests. The study findings have been published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
The study team led by Dr. Esther Lopez-Garcia studied more than 84,000 women and 41,000 men for a period of nearly twenty years. All participants were required to complete questionnaires every two to four years with details about their coffee intake and other habits including diet, smoking and general health.
Detailed analysis of the data gathered showed that women who consumed two to three cups of decaffeinated coffee daily reduced their risk of death due to heart disease by 25 percent during the follow up period compared to people who did not drink coffee; their risk of death due to reasons other than cancer or heart disease also fell by 18 percent.
The benefits are however restricted to women; men who consumed three cups of coffee a day did not in any way receive benefits in terms of risk of death due to heart disease. Even when they took other risk factors such as body size, smoking, diet, and specific diseases, the researchers found people who drank more coffee to be less likely to die during the follow-up period. The reduced risk of heart disease death was again found to be mainly responsible for this lowered risk.
The researchers also found that there were no harmful effects from drinking lots of coffee as people drinking up to six cups of coffee did not have any increase in their risk of death. They could not find any link between coffee drinking and cancer deaths, nor was the lower risk of death due to heart disease linked to caffeine; those who preferred decaffeinated coffee were also found to have lower death rates compared to those who did not drink any coffee.
Dr. Lopez-Garcia said, ??Coffee consumption was not associated with a higher risk of mortality in middle-aged men and women. The possibility of a modest benefit of coffee consumption on heart disease, cancer, and other causes of death needs to be further investigated.?
Editors of the journal however advised caution and said that the design of the study did not ascertain that coffee reduces the risk of early death and it might be possible that there might be other factors protecting the coffee drinkers. The editors also pointed out that the researchers relied on their subjects self-reporting of coffee consumption, which could potentially provide erroneous data.