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Researchers Find No Link between Habitual Coffee Consumption and Arrhythmia:
In a large, prospective, population-based community cohort study of 386,258 coffee drinkers, greater amounts of habitual coffee consumption were inversely associated with a lower risk of cardiac arrhythmia; in fact, each additional daily cup of coffee was associated with a 3% reduced risk of developing an arrhythmia; these associations were not significantly modified by genetic variants that affect caffeine metabolism.
“Coffee is the primary source of caffeine for most people, and it has a reputation for causing or exacerbating arrhythmias,” said Professor Gregory Marcus, a researcher in the Division of Cardiology at the University of California, San Francisco.
“But we found no evidence that caffeine consumption leads to a greater risk of arrhythmias.”
“Our population-based study provides reassurance that common prohibitions against caffeine to reduce arrhythmia risk are likely unwarranted.”
[...] The higher amounts of coffee were actually associated with a 3% reduced risk of developing an arrhythmia.
“Only a randomized clinical trial can definitively demonstrate clear effects of coffee or caffeine consumption,” Professor Marcus said.
[...] “Coffee’s antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties may play a role, and some properties of caffeine could be protective against some arrhythmias.”
[Bolding in original removed.]
Journal Reference:
Eun-jeong Kim, Thomas J. Hoffmann, Gregory Nah, et al. Coffee Consumption and Incident Tachyarrhythmias, JAMA Internal Medicine (DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.3616)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DrkShadow on Thursday July 22 2021, @05:20AM (2 children)
Standard health science, 95% confidence interval, ignoring any sub-groups. (I feel like I get hit by this failed confidence interval far too frequently.)
They tested a huge group, of which <what> percent actually suffers arrhythmia? The conclusions state,
Notably, it says that a randomized sample of the entire group does not have arrhythmias caused by caffeine. Notably, it does not say that, for the subset up people who suffer from arrhythmias, caffeine consumption does not exasperate their arrhythmias. Only that in the general population, where there is not a statistically significant number of arrhythmias overall, it does not get statistically worse for different types of caffeine metabolism genes for the whole population. Great. Yeah. Thanks.
Lets just not use this as justification to recommend coffee to people who are saying that caffeine makes their arrhythmia worse.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 22 2021, @05:23AM
But they used Mendelian randomization. And probably the F-statistic. And Bayesian priors. And mixed effects regression. How can you with your small words possibly trust your own lying eyes?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Thursday July 22 2021, @09:57AM
I have to disagree. Even if the outcome is arrhythmia yes/no (TLDR), the analysis would show whether arrhythmia's are worsened as the definition of arrhythmia needs to imply a cut-off for the yes/no classification based on some underlying quantitative measurement (e.g. ECG recordings). This implies that caffeine would push you above/below that threshold thereby changing your underlying quantitative arrhythmia propensity. If arrhythmia is quantified (e.g. # of arrhythmic episodes), it would more or less directly imply whether arrhythmia's have been worsened or not.
The problematic part is the negative conclusion. The only conclusion possible is that the coffee effect is smaller than a certain value (given by the borders of the confidence interval).