✉️ This story was featured in this week’s Coffee News Club
👋 Get the Coffee News Club newsletter in your inbox weekly—sign up.
Traditionally, doctors have advised people diagnosed with atrial fibrillation (AFib) to avoid or minimize caffeine consumption. According to recent research, this advice may be out of date.
AFib is a quivering or irregular heartbeat that affects around 5% of U.S. adults. People with the condition are five times more likely to experience a stroke and are also at higher risk of blood clots, diabetes, and dementia. Despite research increasingly showing that coffee could be good for our hearts—the American Heart Association even said so recently—the medical consensus still recommends that those with AFib avoid caffeine.
But it turns out one cup of coffee per day could lower the risk of AFib patients suffering an arrhythmia episode.
In a commentary article in the journal Cardiovascular Research, Christopher Wong and Gregory Marcus described the results of their recent research, published in November. Rather than relying on observational data, as many similar coffee health studies do, Wong and Marcus designed a randomized trial.
The DECAF (Does Eliminating Coffee Avoid Fibrillation?) trial split 200 AFib patients into two groups, one that drank a cup of coffee per day for six months and one that abstained from caffeine altogether. The result? Coffee drinkers had a 39% lower risk of a recurrent AFib episode.
The trial had a few limitations. In particular, the study group was small, mostly because many potential participants declined to take part. This was either because they didn’t feel comfortable abstaining from coffee altogether or because they believed caffeine worsened AFib.
“We believe that the DECAF trial should strongly challenge conventional beliefs,” the authors wrote. “At the very least, our results suggest that modest amounts of caffeinated coffee, approximating the one cup per day consumed in the trial, are unlikely to precipitate or worsen AF in most individuals.”
Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash
