Drinking coffee may increase human life span-Study

Boozing up to six cups of coffee everyday may lower the risk of dying from heart disease, a new study by researchers from Harvard and the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid suggests.

The new study, published in the June 17 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine and supported by National Institutes of Health research grants, suggests that both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee consumption is actually beneficial for health, raising doubts about the old popular belief that coffee is associated with increased deaths in men or women.

Dr. Esther Lopez-Garcia, assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Autonoma University here who led the study, says coffee might even help you live longer, and even help the heart, especially for women.

To reach their findings, Dr. Esther Lopez-Garcia and colleagues used 20 years of surveys from two groups of health professionals. They analyzed the coffee drinking habits of 84,214 women who participated in the Nurses' Health Study and 41,736 men who participated in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.

All the study participants were free of heart disease and cancer at the beginning of the study, and they completed questionnaires every two to four years, including information about their coffee drinking, other dietary habits, smoking and health conditions. The male participants were followed for 18 years, while the women for 24 years.

The researchers analyzed the frequency of death from any cause like death due to heart disease and death due to cancer among people with different coffee-drinking habits, and then compared them to those who didn't drink coffee at all.

The researchers found that during the follow-up period, which lasted from 1980 to 2004, women consuming two to three cups of caffeinated coffee per day had a 25 percent lower risk of death from heart disease compared with those who did not drink the brew, and an 18 percent lower risk of death caused by something other than cancer or heart disease as compared with non-consumers during follow-up.

For men, drinking two to three cups of caffeinated coffee a day was associated with neither a higher nor a lower risk of death during the follow-up period, which lasted from 1986 to 2004.

"Our results suggest that long-term, regular coffee consumption does not increase the risk of death and probably has several beneficial effects on health," said lead researcher Dr. Esther Lopez-Garcia

The research team found that the lower death rate in women was linked to a lower risk for heart disease deaths, while no association between coffee drinking and cancer deaths has been found.

According to the paper, among women, 2,368 deaths were due to heart disease, 5,011 were due to cancer, and 3,716 were due to another cause, while among men, 2,049 deaths were due to heart disease, 2,491 were due to cancer, and 2,348 were due to another cause.

However, the authors of the study cautioned that the study does not make it certain that coffee decreases the chances of dying sooner than expected, and urged people with any disease to discuss their risks with their physicians, as caffeine is known to have an acute effect on short-term increase of blood pressure.

"Coffee consumption has been linked to various beneficial and detrimental health effects, but data on its relation with death were lacking," says Dr. Esther Lopez-Garcia. "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."

Having a cup of coffee and getting up in the morning is a routine with most of the people. But some earlier studies have linked the coffee intake with the highest risk for a coronary heart disease, while some others have revealed that drinking coffee may protect people from Parkinson's disease.