Emma Miller
Each additional cup consumed daily reduces the risk of development. Coffee may give you nervous jitters, but it can also reduce your risk of heart rhythm disorders – or “arrhythmias” – a surprising study has found. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco analyzed the effect of coffee consumption on the incidence of arrhythmias in more than 380000 people.
They found that each additional cup consumed daily reduces the risk of developing an irregular heart rhythm by 3 percent. The study was done by bioengineer In Jung Kim of the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues. “In this prospective cohort study, increasing the amount of habitual coffee consumption was associated with a lower risk of arrhythmia,” the researchers wrote in their article.
This was the case, they added, “especially for atrial fibrillation and supraventricular tachycardia, without any evidence that genetically determined differences in caffeine metabolism modified these associations. “General bans on caffeine to reduce arrhythmia risk are probably unwarranted.”
In their study, Kim and colleagues analyzed data on the health, genetics, and coffee consumption habits of 386,258 participants over a period of approximately 5 years. The data for the study was collected by the UK Biobank, a large-scale database containing detailed genetic and health information on half a million participants.
During the follow-up period, 16,979 participants were diagnosed with episodic arrhythmia. After adjusting for confounding factors such as demographics, comorbidities, and lifestyle habits, the team found that each additional regular cup of coffee reduced the risk of arrhythmia by 3%.
Further analysis revealed similar statistically significant reductions in the risk of both atrial fibrillation and supraventricular tachycardia, in particular. In the final part of the study, the team investigated whether seven different genetic variants are known to affect caffeine metabolism altered the relationship between coffee consumption and arrhythmia risk, concluding that they had no effect.
A Mendelian randomized trial involving the same genetic variants similarly found no association between variations in caffeine metabolism and the risk of developing heart rhythm disorders.
