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We sometimes hear about the negative tales of coffee increasing your risk of getting atrial fibrillation, a very common form of irregular heart beat. But is it true?
Well.. a research team in San Francisco gave questionnaires to 130,000 people asking them about coffee intake and other lifestyle habits.
The results are good news for coffee lovers. The study showed that coffee drinkers had lower incidence of admission to hospital for heart arrhythmia. Furthermore, this protective effect was considered additive. For example, men and women who drank more than 4 cups of coffee aday had 18% reduction of arrhythmia risk. This result was generated after adjusting for other potential confounding variables such as body mass index, total cholesterol, blood pressure ... ext. The effect was seen consistent across smokers and non-smokers as well as in different ethnic groups.
Dr Klatsky, team leader, suggests that double blinded randomized control trials would be a better test of this effect, although it might be tricky to convince people off coffee and persuade others to drink coffee.
Nonetheless... if you're a medic, would you discourage your patients with atrial fibrillation or other forms of arrhythmia from drinking coffee?
Leaving you with this thought .. I better go now to make my lovely afternoon cup of coffee !
Have a Healthy Day :-)
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