Study says coffee helps prevent cirrhosis amoung heavy boozers

By Jason Bennert, Bay City News Service

June 13, 2006

People who drink large amounts of alcohol and also drink large amounts of coffee may be less susceptible to developing cirrhosis of the liver, according to a new study by Kaiser Permanente researchers published yesterday.

The researchers followed more than 125,000 Kaiser members who underwent a medical exam between 1978 and 1985. By the end of 2001, 199 participants had been diagnosed with cirrhosis. The Oakland-based researchers found that those who drank more coffee were less likely to develop the deadly malady.

"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,'' study lead author Dr. Arthur Klatsky said. "We did not see a similar protective association between coffee and non-alcoholic cirrhosis.''

Klatsky cautions that the study is not meant to provide alcohol abusers with a way to mitigate the effects of their abuse.

"This is not a recommendation to drink coffee. Nor is it a recommendation that the way to deal with heavy alcohol consumption is to drink more coffee. The value of this study is that it may offer us some clues as to the biochemical processes taking place inside liver cells that could help in finding new ways to protect the liver against injury,'' Klatsky said.

The study found that people drinking one cup of coffee or more each day were, on average, 20 percent less likely to develop alcoholic cirrhosis. The percentages increased with the amount of coffee consumed.

Those drinking two or three cups were 40 percent less likely to develop the condition and those drinking four or more cups were 80 percent less likely, according to Klatsky.

"Even allowing for statistical variation, this shows there is a clear association between coffee consumption, and protection against alcoholic cirrhosis,'' Klatsky said.

The study is in the current issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

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