MILWAUKEE (AP) — One of life’s simple pleasures just got a little sweeter. After years of waffling research on coffee and health, even some fear that java might raise the risk of heart disease, a big study finds the opposite: Coffee drinkers are a little more likely to live longer. Regular or decaf doesn’t matter.
The study of 400,000 people is the largest ever done on the issue, and the results should reassure any coffee lovers who think it’s a guilty pleasure that may do harm.
“Our study suggests that’s really not the case,” said lead researcher Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute. “There may actually be a modest benefit of coffee drinking.”
No one knows why. Coffee contains a thousand things that can affect health, from helpful antioxidants to tiny amounts of substances linked to cancer. The most widely studied ingredient — caffeine — didn’t play a role in the new study’s results.
It’s not that earlier studies were wrong. There is evidence that coffee can raise LDL, or bad cholesterol, and blood pressure at least short-term, and those in turn can raise the risk of heart disease.
Even in the new study, it first seemed that coffee drinkers were more likely to die at any given time. But they also tended to smoke, drink more alcohol, eat more red meat and exercise less than non-coffee-drinkers. Once researchers took those things into account, a clear pattern emerged: Each cup of coffee per day nudged up the chances of living longer.
The study was done by the National Institutes of Health and AARP. The results are published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Careful, though — this doesn’t prove that coffee makes people live longer, only that the two seem related. Like most studies on diet and health, this one was based strictly on observing people’s habits and resulting health. So it can’t prove cause and effect.
But with so many people, more than a decade of follow-up and enough deaths to compare, “this is probably the best evidence we have” and are likely to get, said Dr. Frank Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health. He had no role in this study but helped lead a previous one that also found coffee beneficial.
The new one began in 1995 and involved AARP members ages 50 to 71 in California, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Atlanta and Detroit. People who already had heart disease, a stroke or cancer weren’t included. Neither were folks at diet extremes — too many or too few calories per day.
The rest gave information on coffee drinking once, at the start of the study. “People are fairly consistent in their coffee drinking over their lifetime,” so the single measure shouldn’t be a big limitation, Freedman said.
Of the 402,260 participants, about 42,000 drank no coffee. About 15,000 drank six cups or more a day. Most people had two or three.
By 2008, about 52,000 of them had died. Compared to those who drank no coffee, men who had two or three cups a day were 10 percent less likely to die at any age. For women, it was 13 percent.
Even a single cup a day seemed to lower risk a little: 6 percent in men and 5 percent in women. The strongest effect was in women who had four or five cups a day — a 16 percent lower risk of death.
None of these are big numbers, though, and Freedman can’t say how much extra life coffee might buy.
“I really can’t calculate that,” especially because smoking is a key factor that affects longevity at every age, he said.
Coffee drinkers were less likely to die from heart or respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, injuries, accidents or infections. No effect was seen on cancer death risk, though.
Other research ties coffee drinking to lower levels of markers for inflammation and insulin resistance. Researchers also considered that people in poor health might refrain from drinking coffee and whether their abstention could bias the results. But the study excluded people with cancer and heart disease — the most common health problems — to minimize this chance. Also, the strongest benefits of coffee drinking were seen in people who were healthiest when the study began.
About two-thirds of study participants drank regular coffee, and the rest, decaf. The type of coffee made no difference in the results.
Hu had this advice for coffee lovers:
— Watch the sugar and cream. Extra calories and fat could negate any benefits from coffee.
— Drink filtered coffee rather than boiled — filtering removes compounds that raise LDL, the bad cholesterol.
Researchers did not look at tea, soda or other beverages but plan to in future analyses.
Lou and Mariann Maris have already compared them. Sipping a local brew at a lakefront coffee shop, the suburban Milwaukee couple told of how they missed coffee after briefly giving it up in the 1970s as part of a health kick that included transcendental meditation and eating vegetarian.
Mariann Maris switched to tea after being treated for breast cancer in 2008, but again missed the taste of coffee. It’s one of life’s great pleasures, especially because her husband makes it, she said.
“Nothing is as satisfying to me as a cup of coffee in the morning,” she said.
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Online:
New England Journal: http://www.nejm.org
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Follow Marilynn Marchione’s coverage on Twitter http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
Coffee seems to be good for you. Or at least it’s not bad, say researchers who led the largest-ever study of coffee and health.
They found that coffee drinkers seemed a little more likely to live longer than folks who drink no coffee at all. Regular or decaf didn’t matter.
That’s reassuring because a few studies in the past suggested coffee might be harmful. Results of the latest study are published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
WHY THE FUZZY RESEARCH?
Older studies weren’t wrong: Coffee can raise cholesterol and blood pressure in the short term, which in turn can raise the risk of heart disease.
But few studies have looked at coffee and the risk of dying of any cause, let alone specific diseases. Some of those that have involved too few deaths to make firm comparisons.
CAN WE TRUST THIS ONE?
No study is perfect, and like most diet studies, this one is just based on observing people’s habits and resulting health. So it can’t prove coffee lengthens lives. But experts say it’s the best look yet at this issue.
It involved more than 400,000 people and was done by the National Institutes of Health and AARP.
Researchers also took into account smoking, drinking alcohol, exercise and other things that can skew results.
HOW MUCH DIFFERENCE DID COFFEE MAKE?
Very little, especially in relation to bigger factors such as smoking.
Compared with those who drank no coffee, men who had two or three cups a day were 10 percent less likely to die at any age. For women, it was 13 percent.
A single cup a day lowered risk a tiny bit: 6 percent in men and 5 percent in women. The strongest effect was in women who had four or five cups a day — they had a 16 percent lower risk of death.
SO IT’S OK TO DRINK ALL I WANT?
Watch the sugar and cream. Extra calories and fat could negate any good from drinking coffee.
Doctors also suggest drinking filtered coffee — that removes the compounds that raise LDL or bad cholesterol.
Test-tube babies have higher rates of birth defects, and doctors have long wondered: Is it because of certain fertility treatments or infertility itself? A large new study from Australia suggests both may play a role.
Compared to those conceived naturally, babies that resulted from simple IVF, or in vitro fertilization — mixing eggs and sperm in a lab dish — had no greater risk of birth defects once factors such as the mom’s age and smoking were taken into account.
However, birth defects were more common if treatment included injecting a single sperm into an egg, which is done in many cases these days, especially if male infertility is involved. About 10 percent of babies born this way had birth defects versus 6 percent of those conceived naturally, the study found.
It could be that the extra jostling of egg and sperm does damage. Or that other problems lurk in the genes of sperm so defective they must be forced to fertilize an egg.
“I don’t want to scare people,” because the vast majority of babies are born healthy, said the study’s leader, Michael Davies of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Couples could use simple IVF without sperm injection, freeze the embryos and implant only one or two at a time, he said. All of those can cut the chance of a birth defect.
The study was published online Saturday by the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at a fertility conference in Barcelona, Spain. Health agencies in Australia paid for the research.
More than 3.7 million babies are born each year through assisted reproduction. Methods include everything from drugs to coax the ovaries to make eggs to artificial insemination and IVF. Fertility treatments account for about 4 percent of births in Australia and as many as 8 percent of them in Denmark, where costs are widely covered, Davies said.
In the United States, more than 60,000 babies were born in 2009 from 146,000 IVF attempts. About three-quarters of them used ICSI, or intracytoplasmic sperm injection.
ICSI was developed because of male infertility. But half the time, it was not done for that reason but to improve the odds that at least some embryos will be created from an IVF attempt. Many clinics do it in all cases.
IVF costs around $10,000 to $12,000 per attempt and another $2,000 for sperm injection.
The study used records on nearly 303,000 babies conceived naturally and 6,163 conceived with help in Australia from 1986 through 2002, plus records on birth defects detected by age 5. Researchers counted heart, spinal or urinary tract defects, limb abnormalities and problems such as cleft palate or lip, but not minor defects unless they needed treatment or were disfiguring.
They looked at birth defect rates according to type of fertility treatment. They also had three comparison groups of women who conceived naturally, including some with some history of infertility or who previously needed help to get pregnant.
Among fertility treatments, only ICSI, the sperm injection, resulted in higher rates of birth defects once other factors that affect these odds were taken into account.
“They take a sperm that is probably not normal and force it to conceive,” said Dr. Darine El-Chaar, an OB-GYN at Canada’s University of Ottawa. She led a smaller previous study of this and called the new work impressive and “the study that needed to be done” to sort out the source of these risks.
In the study, frozen embryos were less likely to result in birth defects than fresh ones used soon after they were created. Defective ones may be less likely to survive freezing and thawing, so the fittest embryos result in pregnancies, Davies said.
Babies born to women with a history of infertility who ended up conceiving on their own, or who had natural pregnancies after assisted ones, also had higher rates of birth defects. That suggests that infertility itself is playing a role.
Dr. Glenn Schattman, president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies and a Cornell University fertility specialist, said it was reassuring that ordinary IVF is safe. If ICSI is chosen because male infertility is involved, “parents have to be aware that by having a child with their own genetic material, they might be increasing their risk” of a birth defect, he said.
Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson, a geneticist and research chief at the March of Dimes, said doctors should take this work seriously and discuss it with patients. He said techniques have improved over the last decade and ICSI may be safer now than when this study began.
Even with genetic testing for various diseases, “we always tell our patients that this doesn’t guarantee a perfect baby,” he said.
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Online:
New England Journal: http://www.nejm.org
Infertility information: http://www.sart.org and http://www.asrm.org
Sperm injection explanation: http://bit.ly/Inb688
CDC on fertility treatments: http://www.cdc.gov/art/ARTReports.htm
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Follow Marilynn Marchione at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
CHICAGO (AP) — New research suggests that long-term use of any type of hormones to ease menopause symptoms can raise a women’s risk of breast cancer.
It is already known that taking pills that combine estrogen and progestin pills, the most common type of hormone therapy, can increase breast cancer risk. But women who no longer have a uterus can take estrogen alone, and this was thought to be safe and possibly even beneficial in terms of cancer risk.
But the new study suggests otherwise. It tracked the health of 60,000 nurses and found that use of any kind of hormones for 10 years or more raised the chances of developing breast cancer.
Results were discussed Sunday at a cancer conference in Chicago.
CHICAGO (AP) — New research might help explain why black women are so much more likely than whites to develop and die from cervical cancer.
The research finds that blacks seem to have more trouble clearing HPV, the virus that causes the disease.
Researchers have long thought that less access to health care makes blacks more vulnerable to cervical cancer. But the new study suggests that there might also be a biological reason.
Doctors say that if other research confirms that finding, the HPV vaccine would become even more important for black women. The vaccine is recommended for all girls starting at age 11.
The study involved students at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Results were discussed Sunday at an American Association for Cancer Research conference in Chicago.
CHICAGO (AP) — New research gives clear proof that weight-loss surgery can reverse and possibly cure diabetes, and doctors say it should be offered sooner to more people with the disease — not just as a last resort.
The two studies, released on Monday, are the first to compare stomach-reducing operations to medicines alone for “diabesity” — Type 2 diabetes brought on by obesity. Millions of Americans have this and can’t make enough insulin or use what they do make to process sugar from food.
Both studies found that surgery helped far more patients achieve normal blood-sugar levels than medicines alone did.
The results were dramatic: Some people were able to stop taking insulin as soon as three days after their operations. Cholesterol and other heart risk factors also greatly improved.
Doctors don’t like to say “cure” because they can’t promise a disease will never come back. But in one study, most surgery patients were able to stop all diabetes drugs and have their disease stay in remission for at least two years. None of those treated with medicines alone could do that.
“It is a major advance,” said Dr. John Buse of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a prominent diabetes expert who had no role in the studies. Buse said he often recommends surgery to patients who are obese and can’t control their blood-sugar through medications, but many are leery of it. “This evidence will help convince them that this really is an important therapy to at least consider,” he said.
The studies were published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, and the larger one was presented Monday at an American College of Cardiology conference in Chicago.
More than a third of American adults are obese, and more than 8 percent have diabetes, a major cause of heart disease and strokes. Between 5 million and 10 million are like the people in these studies, with both problems.
For a century, doctors have been treating diabetes with pills and insulin, and encouraging weight loss and exercise with limited success. Few very obese people can drop enough pounds without surgery, and many of the medicines used to treat diabetes can cause weight gain, making things worse.
Surgery offers hope for a long-term fix. It costs $15,000 to $25,000, and Medicare covers it for very obese people with diabetes. Gastric bypass is the most common type: Through “keyhole” surgery, doctors reduce the stomach to a small pouch and reconnect it to the small intestine.
One previous study tested stomach banding — a less drastic and reversible procedure for limiting the size of the stomach. This technique lowered blood sugar, but those patients had mild diabetes. The new studies tested permanent weight-loss surgery in people with longtime, severe diabetes.
At the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Philip Schauer studied 150 people given one of two types of surgery plus standard medicines or a third group given medicines alone. Their A1c levels — the key blood-sugar measure — were over 9 on average at the start. A healthy A1c is 6 or below.
One year after treatment began, only 12 percent of those treated with medicines alone were at that level, versus 42 percent and 37 percent of the two groups given surgery.
Use of medicines for high cholesterol and other heart risks dropped among those in the surgery groups but rose in the group on medicines alone.
“Every single one of the bypass patients who got to 6 or less got there without the need for any diabetes medicines. Almost half of them were on insulin at the start. That’s pretty amazing,” said a study co-leader, Dr. Steven Nissen, the Cleveland Clinic’s cardiovascular chief.
An obesity surgery equipment company sponsored the study, and some of the researchers are paid consultants; the federal government also contributed grant support.
The second study was led by Dr. Geltrude Mingrone at the Catholic University in Rome and Dr. Francesco Rubino, diabetes surgery chief at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. It involved 60 patients given one of two types of surgery or medicines alone, and set a goal of an A1c of 6.5 — the definition of diabetes.
Two years later, 95 percent and 75 percent of the two surgery groups achieved and maintained the target blood-sugar levels without any diabetes drugs. None of those in the medicine-alone group did.
There were signs that the surgery itself — not just weight loss — helps reverse diabetes. Food makes the gut produce hormones to spur insulin, so trimming away part of it surgically may affect those hormones, doctors believe.
Weight-loss surgery “has proven to be a very appropriate and excellent treatment for diabetes,” Rubino said. “The most proper name for the surgery would be diabetes surgery.”
Dr. Alvin Powers, director of the Vanderbilt University diabetes center, said the results are very encouraging for people like those in these studies — very obese, with diabetes that can’t be controlled through less drastic means.
“We still don’t know the long-term outcomes of these surgeries” and whether benefits will last for more than a few years, he said.
Others were more positive.
The studies “are likely to have a major effect on future diabetes treatment,” two diabetes experts from Australia, Dr. Paul Zimmet and George Alberti, wrote in an editorial in the medical journal. Surgery “should not be seen as a last resort” and should be considered earlier in treating obese people with diabetes, they wrote.
Jon Diat is a success story. Diat, 50, who works at Citigroup and lives in New York, had been piling on pounds and pills for cholesterol and high blood pressure. After he needed an artery-opening procedure he was diagnosed with diabetes, but medicines for that failed to keep his disease under control and worsened his obesity.
“I was maxed out on the medications. It was very grim,” he said. Two years ago, he had weight-loss surgery from Rubino.
“They told me, ‘You’re going to see rapid results,’ but it was amazing. I literally lost 70 pounds in the first three months,” he said. “I was off insulin within less than 72 hours of surgery. I am in complete, total remission of diabetes. My blood sugars are normal.”
Now he eats right, plays tennis and hockey, walks the two miles home from work and takes 12 flights of stairs to his apartment.
“I look at this as a second chance at life,” he said. “It’s been liberating.”
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AP reporter Ted Shaffrey in New York contributed to this report.
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Online:
Surgery explainer: http://win.niddk.nih.gov/publications/gastric.htm(hash)SurgAdult
Body Mass Index calculator: http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/bminojs.htm
Heart meeting: www.cardiosource.org
New England Journal: www.nejm.org
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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
In this March 23, 2012 photo, Dr. Francesco Rubino, a surgeon at Weill Cornell Medical Center, joins his patient Tamikka McCray, 39, for an interview in New York. McCray no longer needed to take diabetes medication and insulin after her weigh-loss surgery. Research by Dr. Francesco Rubino, McCray's surgeon at Weill Cornell, and other doctors gives clear proof that weight-loss surgery can reverse and possibly cure diabetes. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)(Credit: AP) 