Boozing one cup of coffee everyday may help protect against the type of liver disease caused by excessive alcohol intake, researchers have discovered.
The study, conducted by Dr Arthur Klatsky and colleagues at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Programme in Oakland, California, used data from 125,580 health plan members -over 22 years- who underwent a medical examination between 1978-1985 and who, at the beginning of the study, had no diagnosed liver disease.
They were followed for an average of more than 14 years. Study subjects filled out a questionnaire detailing how much alcohol, coffee and tea they drank daily.
The researchers, whose findings are published in the US journal Archives of Internal Medicine, discovered that people who drank one cup a day or less were about 30% less likely to develop alcoholic cirrhosis compared with those who never drank coffee. The more coffee they drank, the protective effect increased. People who drank two or three cups a day were 40% less likely to contract cirrhosis, while those who drank more than four cups a day reduced their risk by 80%.
However, coffee had no statistically significant effect on the risk for nonalcoholic cirrhosis.
The report reads, "This supports the hypothesis that there is an ingredient in coffee that protects against cirrhosis, especially alcoholic cirrhosis."
The recent study is thought to be the largest study to look at the inverse relationship between coffee and cirrhosis. The link was first reported by scientists at the same institute in 1993 but this novel study "solidifies the association", Arthur L Klatsky, a cardiologist with the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Oakland, Calif. and the lead author of the study, said.
Dr Klatsky, who was involved in the earlier research, said, "Consuming coffee seems to have some protective benefits against alcoholic cirrhosis, and the more coffee a person consumes the less risk they seem to have of being hospitalized or dying of alcoholic cirrhosis. We did not see a similar protective association between coffee and non-alcoholic cirrhosis."
However, the researchers are unsure what the key ingredient in coffee is at work, but since tea drinking offered no protection against either form of the disease, they arrived at a conclusion that caffeine was not responsible for the effect.
Dr Klatsky also said, "Even allowing for statistical variation, this shows there is a clear association between coffee consumption and protection against alcoholic cirrhosis," but, "This is not a recommendation to drink coffee. Nor is it a recommendation that the way to deal with heavy alcohol consumption is to drink more coffee. And while there is very little evidence that moderate coffee drinking - say up to four cups a day - is harmful to the health, that's not the message we want to get across. There is a lot of harm caused by heavy drinking other than liver damage."
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