Want to reduce your risk of stroke, ladies? Then you might want to start drinking at least one cup of coffee a day.
According to a new study, drinking more than a cup of coffee a day was associated with a 22 percent to 25 percent lower risk of stroke in women, compared with those who drank less.
Little or no coffee consumption was associated with an increased risk of stroke in a study of 34,670 women (ages 49 to 83) followed for an average 10.4 years. It's too soon to change coffee-drinking habits, but the study should ease the concerns of some women, researchers noted in their study, which was published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association..
Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world. "Therefore, even small health effects of substances in coffee may have large public health consequences," said Susanna Larsson, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a researcher in the Division of Nutritional Epidemiology, National Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
Groups who reported drinking 1-2 cups per day, 3-4 cups per day or 5 or more cups per day had similar benefits compared with those who reported daily intake of less than a cup of coffee, researchers said.
The differences were unchanged by smoking status, body mass index, history of diabetes, hypertension or alcohol consumption, indicating that coffee's effects are not influenced by those known cardiovascular risk factors.
Scientists have theorized that coffee could have either beneficial or harmful effects on the cardiovascular system, but earlier studies have been inconclusive. Only one previous prospective study, which was also inconclusive, examined the association between coffee consumption and stroke incidence in healthy women.
"Our research group has previously observed an inverse association between coffee consumption and risk in Finnish male smokers," Larsson said. "We wanted to assess the situation in women."
The women participated in the long-running Swedish Mammography Cohort, an epidemiological study investigating the association between diet, lifestyle and disease development. All the women were free of cardiovascular disease and cancer at baseline in 1997, when they answered the food frequency questionnaire analyzed in the study. Researchers collected data on cases of first stroke that occurred.
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