Washington: According to the findings of a new research, consuming caffeinated coffee appears to have both beneficial and harmful short-term health effects like increased abnormal heartbeats, increased physical activity and reduced sleep duration.
The findings were presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2021.
Consuming coffee was consistently associated with more physical activity as well as less sleep. Specifically:
# Participants who consumed coffee logged more than 1,000 additional steps per day compared to days when they did not drink coffee.
# On the day participants drank coffee, they had 36 fewer minutes of sleep per night according to their Fitbit devices.
# Drinking more than one coffee drink more than doubled the number of irregular heartbeats arising from the heart’s lower chambers.
# Each additional cup of coffee consumed was associated with nearly 600 more steps per day and 18 fewer minutes of sleep per night.
# There were no differences in continuously recorded glucose measured when the study participants consumed versus avoided coffee.
The analysis found that coffee consumption was associated with a 54 per cent increase in premature ventricular contractions, a type of abnormal heartbeat originating in the lower heart chambers reported to feel like a skipped heartbeat. In contrast, drinking more coffee was associated with fewer episodes of supraventricular tachycardia, an abnormally rapid heart rhythm arising from the upper heart chambers.
The investigators also sought to determine if changes in exercise or sleep influenced coffee’s effects on abnormal heart rhythms, and no such association was identified.
Marcus noted that because coffee was randomly assigned to the study participants, cause-and-effect can be inferred. These observations were made during repeated assessments of days when coffee was consumed versus when it was not for each study participant, eliminating concerns regarding differences in individual-level characteristics as an explanation for these results.
