For someone who “wakes” to the wafting aroma of coffee everyday, the idea of a favorite drink raising blood pressure can be as traumatic as a baby without its security blanket. But a new study published in the current week's Journal of American Medical Association reassures women coffee-drinkers that their drink is far from risky as compared to colas.
The bolt from the blue is as warm as a cuppa and comes from researchers who trailed 155,000 women over 12 years only to find that coffee, even when consumed as six cups a day, fails to raise risks of high blood pressure.
Dr. Wolgfang Winkelmayer of Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital who led the study said contrary to popular belief, “We found that coffee was not associated with increased risk of high blood pressure". To their surprise, they noted that the same caffeine when carbonated as diet or regular “cola” drink raised risks of high blood pressure.
The group of respondents who were mostly white female nurses averaging 55 years in age, entertained periodical questions on their diets and health for over a decade. With 33,000 of them diagnosed with high blood pressure, the researchers found that those women whose daily fix of coffee was more than three cups had 7 to 12 percent lower propensity to develop high blood pressure than those who drank little or no coffee.
Whereas those women who sipped a minimum of four cans of sugared cola suffered a 28 to 44 percent raised risk of high blood pressure as against those who drank little or not at all. Diet sodas were also found to raise risks though by a marginally lower percentage than non-diet drinks.
But the link between cola and an increase of high blood pressure came as "a complete surprise” to Dr. Winkelmayer and his team and is a potential cause for worry. Researchers however are unclear why cola increases blood pressure and believe that further studies are required to understand the real link. But more importantly the study gave evidence that women who drink many cups of coffee a day actually faced lower risks of developing high blood pressure than those who did not drink any at all. Dr.Winkelmayer put this result down to the antioxidants present in coffee that are otherwise believed to protect from heart disease and cancer.
Caffeine, a well-known component of both colas and aromatic coffee has known to promote short-term increases in blood pressure. However that long term coffee drinkers have no more propensity than abstainers for high blood pressure is surpriseing. With past data on the link between coffee and raised BP being confusing, many BP patients worried about having to give up the very drink that gave them energy. But the study by Dr. Winkelmayer and his team suggests that if at all there is any link, it is only temporary and in fact in the long term coffee maybe beneficial to women.
Funded by the government the study has no reason to promote one drink over the other. Already many studies have indicated the beneficial effects of coffee drinking even for men in terms of reducing risks of diabetes and liver cancer. Some researchers however opine that there maybe a racial link between coffee and hypertension.
But as Dr. Winkelmayer observes of the link between colas and hypertension, "At the end of the day we need to find the biological link". Until that link is found women better sip the coffee and savor its rejuvenating aroma rather than grabbing the cool cola.
