Study Finds Coffee Drinkers Have Lower Risk of Death
Posted on May 18, 2012
A new study by researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and AARP offers potentially good news for coffee drinkers. It found that older adults who drank coffee had a lower risk of death overall than others who did not drink coffee. This includes both regular both decaffeinated coffee.
Coffee drinkers in the study were less likely to die than non coffee drinkers in several different ways, including heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, accidents, diabetes and infections. The association was not seen for coffee drinkers and death from cancer. The results were observed after adjusting for the effects of high risk factors on mortality, such as smoking and consuming alcohol. The researchers say they can't be sure this means drinking coffee actually makes people live longer. The results of the study were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
400,000 U.S. men and women aged 50 to 71 participated in the coffee and death study, which was named NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study. The study was led by Neal Freedman, Ph.D., Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, NCI. The participants' coffee intake level was self-reported by the participants only at a single time point, so it might not reflect long-term patterns of intake. The study followed the participants until the date of their death, or Dec. 31, 2008, whichever came first.
The researchers found that the association between coffee and reduction in risk of death increased with the amount of coffee consumed. Those who consumed three or more cups of coffee per day had approximately a 10% lower risk of death than those who did not drink coffee.
Freedman says in a release, "Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in America, but the association between coffee consumption and risk of death has been unclear. We found coffee consumption to be associated with lower risk of death overall, and of death from a number of different causes. Although we cannot infer a causal relationship between coffee drinking and lower risk of death, we believe these results do provide some reassurance that coffee drinking does not adversely affect health."
USA Today quotes cardiologist Steve Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic who tells the public to ignore the study's findings.