Coffee Found to Reduce Non-Viral Cirrhosis Risk
A recent study has reportedly demonstrated “the protective effect of coffee on non-viral hepatitis-related cirrhosis mortality.” George Boon-Bee Goh, et al., “Coffee, alcohol and other beverages in relation to cirrhosis mortality: the Singapore Chinese Health study,” Hepatology, April 2014. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers examined diet, lifestyle and medical history data from 63,275 middle aged participants enrolled in The Singapore Chinese Health Study over a mean follow-up of 14.7 years. During that time, 114 participants died from cirrhosis related to viral hepatitis (33 percent), chronic alcohol consumption (12 percent) and hepatitis C (2 percent), as well as biliary cirrhosis, autoimmune cirrhosis, and cryptogenic or unspecified cirrhosis.
In addition to finding that alcohol consumption was “a strong risk factor for cirrhosis mortality,” the study evidently showed an inverse dose dependent relationship between caffeine intake and non-viral cirrhosis mortality. The study’s authors have suggested that “the benefit of coffee on the progression of liver disease may be due to its effects on the oxidative/lipotoxicity pathway, which underlie the pathogenesis of cirrhosis related to alcohol, NAFLD [nonalcoholic fatty liver disease] and possibly, in part, CHC [chronic hepatitis C].”
“Compared to non-daily coffee drinkers, those who drank two or more cups per day had a 66% reduction in mortality risk,” they concluded, suggesting that it was the coffee itself, not just the caffeine, that was responsible for the reduced risk of death from liver cirrhosis. “Our study is the first to demonstrate a differential effect of coffee consumption between non-viral and viral hepatitis-related cirrhosis morality, and thus harmonize the seemingly conflicting results on the effect of coffee in Western and Asia-based studies… Since coffee is consumed globally, it has significant clinical and public-health implications and provides further impetus to evaluate coffee as a potential therapeutic agent in patients with chronic liver diseases.”
Issue 519
