A daily cup could keep your ticker in tip top shape! That’s all you need to know; don’t worry about the fine print.
It’s official: coffee is back in!
This back page scribe is as elated as when science finally came to the defence of the humble potato, a gift from nature which had been slandered by health activists for decades.
Scientists are out here doing the lord’s work once more.
A research team from Australia, the US and Canada have found that a cup of coffee a day significantly reduced the risk of recurrent atrial fibrillation (AF) compared to coffee abstinence.
This means we should be drinking coffee for our heart health. End of story.
You don’t need to keep reading, right? That’s all the information this author needs to keep drinking guilt-free.
Ok fine, if you insist, I’ll admit there are caveats to this.
The multicentre randomised clinical trial looked very specifically at patients with persistent AF who were undergoing cardioversion.
But still, there were 200 of them and the stats were pretty impressive.
The risk of recurrent AF in the group allocated to coffee consumption was 47%, compared to 64% in the coffee abstinence group.
The DECAF trial (boy do they work hard to keep coming up with comically appropriate trial names) enrolled current or previous (within the past five years) coffee-drinking adults from five hospitals across the three countries between 2021 and 2024.
At baseline, the average weekly coffee consumption across all participants was seven cups.
The lucky patients randomised to the coffee consumption group were encouraged to drink at least one cup of caffeinated coffee every day.
Patients in the abstinence group had to completely abstain from caffeine-containing products and decaffeinated coffee. Prohibiting even the fake stuff seems unnecessarily cruel, but I guess the researchers wanted to rob these people of any possibility of coffee-related satisfaction.
After six months, the coffee drinkers had a 39% lower hazard of AF recurrence (hazard ratio, 0.61 [95% CI, 0.42-0.89]; P = .01), and no significant difference in adverse events was observed between the two groups.
Alright, I’ll admit it: the more I read, the less applicable it seems to most people.
But, in keeping with the millennial spirit of taking headlines and running with them, this author is happy to take to TikTok and preach the benefits of a daily cup.
We’ve got to get the word out.
You can send story tips and a large cappuccino to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
