OpenCoffee.com
Title
Open Coffee Library
Description
OAKLAND, Calif., June 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Drinking coffee could help protect against alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver. That's the finding of a new study in the June 12 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Researchers at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif., followed more than 125,000 health plan members who underwent a medical exam between 1978 and 1985. At the time, none of the members had diagnosed liver disease. Participants filled out a questionnaire detailing how much alcohol, coffee and tea they drank per day. By the end of 2001, 330 participants had been diagnosed with liver disease, including 199 with alcoholic cirrhosis. The researchers found that the more coffee a person drank, the less likely they were to develop alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver.
"Consuming coffee seems to have some protective benefits against alcoholic cirrhosis, and the more coffee a person consumes the less risk they seem to have of being hospitalized or dying of alcoholic cirrhosis," said Arthur Klatsky, MD, an investigator with Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research and the lead author of the study. "We did not see a similar protective association between coffee and non-alcoholic cirrhosis."
