Drink Coffee, Not Tea, To Ward Off Liver Cirrhosis

A new study has found that drinking coffee may significantly reduce one’s risk of death from liver cirrhosis, specifically non-viral hepatitis-related cirrhosis.

“There is no good treatment option for chronic liver disease, especially if unrelated to chronic viral hepatitis,” said senior author Woon-Puay Koh, PhD, Associate Professor, Office of Clinical Sciences, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore, and Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Singapore. “Hence, there is a need to identify potential therapeutic agents that may retard the disease process. Since coffee is widely consumed globally, it thus has significant clinical and public health implications.”
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

RELATED CONTENT
A Cup of Coffee A Day Keeps the Doctor Away
Drinking Coffee Can Benefit Long-Term Memory
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The researchers did not detect a link between the consumption of tea, fruit juices, or soft drinks and the risk of death from cirrhosis.

“Previous animal studies have suggested that caffeine could be the protective ingredient in coffee,” explained Koh. “However, in our study, the reduced risk associated with caffeine intake was no longer present after adjusting for coffee consumption. Furthermore, other caffeine-containing beverages like green tea and black tea had no significant effects with cirrhosis mortality. Hence, our study suggests that other chemicals in coffee, and not caffeine, are responsible for the protective effect of coffee on the liver.”

Researchers also reported that coffee consumption was not linked to viral hepatitis B-related cirrhosis mortality.

“Our study is the first to demonstrate a difference in the effect of coffee between non-viral and viral hepatitis-related cirrhosis mortality, and thus harmonizes the seemingly conflicting results between the beneficial effect of coffee in Western-based studies, where the underlying causes of cirrhosis in the majority of cases are non-viral, such as chronic alcohol abuse and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) related to diabetes and obesity, and the generally null findings from Asian-based studies where chronic viral hepatitis B infection remains a predominate cause of liver cirrhosis,” said Koh.

Researchers analyzed data involving over 63,000 middle-aged and elderly Chinese patients from the Singapore Chinese Health Study. Participants were asked about their diet, lifestyle, and medical histories in the form of questionnaires during in-person interviews.

After an average follow-up of nearly 15 years, nearly 15,000 deaths were reported, including 114 deaths from liver cirrhosis.

A dose-dependent inverse association was found between coffee consumption and the risk of non-viral hepatitis-related cirrhosis mortality. In fact, participants who consumed at least two cups of coffee per day had a 66% reduction in mortality risk compared with those who did not drink coffee.

In addition, drinking alcohol increased the risk of death from cirrhosis in the study.

“Our findings suggest that while the benefit of coffee may be less apparent in the Asian population where chronic viral hepatitis B infection predominates currently, this is expected to change due to increase in prevalence of NAFLD, which is associated with diabetes and obesity,” said Koh.

Some study limitations, as noted by Koh, include the fact that researchers only used the baseline intake of beverages in the analysis.

“Any subsequent change in the consumption of coffee post interview could potentially underestimate the strength of the association in our findings,” he said. “However, results from the responses obtained during our Follow-up II Survey, which was conducted, on average, about 12 years post recruitment, revealed that among the 39,528 cohort subjects re-interviewed about their coffee drinking habit, 72.3% did not change their coffee-drinking status as daily or non-daily drinkers.”

In addition, viral hepatitis diagnoses were ascertained from death records and may have been underreported, which could have potentially led to an inadvertent inclusion of these cases in the non-viral hepatitis-related group.

“This could again cause an underestimation the coffee-mortality association reported for non-viral hepatitis-related cirrhosis,” he added.

In terms of future research, Koh suggested that coffee as a potential therapeutic agent in patients with chronic liver diseases should be evaluated in randomized interventional trials. In addition, the protective ingredients in coffee that may have protective effects in the liver should be identified.

This study was funded by grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and was published in Hepatology.

-Meredith Edwards White

Reference

Goh GBB, Chow WC, Wang R, Yuan JM, Koh WP. Coffee, alcohol and other beverages in relation to cirrhosis mortality: the Singapore Chinese Health Study. Hepatology. 2014. doi: 10.1002/hep.27054.