Coffee consumption protects against liver disease- study

A UK study released Tuesday reports that coffee consumption results in lower rates of chronic liver disease.

Coffee from The Coffee Mill (photo credit: THE COFFEE MILL)
Coffee from The Coffee Mill
(photo credit: THE COFFEE MILL)
Coffee drinkers report lower and less serious rates of chronic liver disease (CLD), a new UK-based Biobank study found.

The study was published on Tuesday in BMC, a collection of peer-reviewed medicine, science and technology journals.

Among lower and middle-income countries, CLD is causing increased morbidity and mortality rates, the study found.

The study included data on 494,585 coffee consumers aged 40-69 along with hospital, death, and cancer rates. The participants were mostly from urban areas and were examined across the Biobank hospital network.

Coffee consumers were divided into categories based on the number of cups they drank per day as well as the type of coffee they typically drank -  decaffeinated, instant, ground, or other.

Participants were also asked about their alcohol consumption behaviors and were measured for their body mass index (BMI). Finally, each participant was assigned a Townsend deprivation score. The variables are car ownership, whether a person lives in an overcrowded area, their employment status, and homeownership status.

After tracking the participants for a median of 10 years, the researchers found incident CLD, or a new presence of it, as well as incident Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and death from CLD.

The study found coffee consumption of any type to be a protective factor against CLD.

The study showed that coffee drinkers had 21% lower rates of incident CLD, 20% lower rates of CLD or steatosis and 49% reduced risk of death from CLD. These inverse rates were consistent among those in normal, overweight, and obese BMI categories as well as those with or without diabetes.

The findings of the study may be instrumental for those in lower and middle-income countries where access to treatments for CLD is few and far between.  

Some limitations of the study lie in variations between various sizes of coffee cups as well as the impact of greater than 5 cups of coffee per day which was not measured.