Coffee Consumption May Protect Liver from Alcohol

William Wagner · medicine forum Guru Joined: 29 Apr 2005 Posts: 809

I wonder if it protects from other liver damaging agents. Last time
I had blood work for my heart the liver was a point of interest.

AKA statins comes to mind in a stretch of imagination.

Bill

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"In a cohort study of Kaiser Permanente members, drinking one to three
cups of coffee a day was associated with a 40% decrease in the risk of
alcoholic cirrhosis versus drinking less than one cup (P<0.001),
according to a report in the June 13 issue of the Archives of Internal
Medicine."

Coffee Consumption May Protect Liver from Alcohol

By Peggy Peck, Managing Editor, MedPage Today
Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor at the University of
Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
June 12, 2006
Also covered by: CBS News, Forbes, MSNBC, Yahoo! News
MedPage Today Action Points

* Explain to interested patients that while this study suggests that
coffee consumption is associated with a reduced risk of alcoholic
cirrhosis, the observational nature of the data limits any attempt to
establish a causal link.

* In this study the benefit of coffee was seen only among those who
were at risk for alcoholic cirrhosis.

Review
Arthur L. Klatsky, M.D.
Kaiser Permanente
Division of Research

OAKLAND, Calif. June 12 ‹ Coffee may help protect the livers of heavy
alcohol drinkers.

In a cohort study of Kaiser Permanente members, drinking one to three
cups of coffee a day was associated with a 40% decrease in the risk of
alcoholic cirrhosis versus drinking less than one cup (P<0.001),
according to a report in the June 13 issue of the Archives of Internal
Medicine.

Moreover, Arthur L. Klatsky, M.D., and colleagues at the Kaiser
Permanente Division of Research wrote that this protective effect
appears to be dose-dependent. Those who drank four or more cups of
coffee had an 80% decrease in the relative risk of alcoholic cirrhosis
(95% CI 0.1-0.4, P<0.001).

Among subgroups of patients with nonalcoholic cirrhosis, coffee had a
similar, weak, nonstatistically significant inverse relation to risk of
either viral hepatitis-associated cirrhosis or to miscellaneous other
cirrhosis.

Tea drinking, on the other hand, was unrelated to the risk of either
alcoholic or nonalcoholic cirrhosis.

Dr. Klatzky and colleagues studied data from 129,580 Kaiser Permanente
members who completed baseline background health questionnaires and an
alcohol questionnaire between 1978 and 1985. By 2001, 330 of these
patients developed cirrhosis-199 were diagnosed with alcoholic cirrhosis
and 131 with nonalcoholic cirrhosis.

Sixty-five percent of patients with alcoholic cirrhosis and 54% of
patients with non-alcoholic cirrhosis were men, and in both groups about
half of the patients were 50 or younger.

The risk of cirrhosis, both alcoholic and nonalcoholic, increased with
age, male sex, and obesity, but education was protective-cirrhosis risk
declined as years of education increased.

Among the findings:

* Coffee drinking was positively correlated with smoking and alcohol
drinking.
* As expected mean blood levels of AST and ALT increased as alcohol
consumption increased.
* In a cross-sectional analysis coffee drinking was inversely
related to AST and ALT levels, people who drank four or more cups of
coffee daily reduced the risk of elevated AST by 50% (95% CI, 0.4-0.6; P
<0.001) and for elevated ALT by 40% (95% CI 0.6-0.7; P<0.001).

Additionally, the inverse relationship between liver enzyme elevations
and coffee consumption was strongest among heavy drinkers.

The authors noted a number of limitations to their study, including the
fact that smoking, drinking, and coffee consumption are often related
habits, which makes it "difficult to rule out residual confounding by
alcohol amount or drinking pattern." Nonetheless, they argued that
smoking "may prolong the persistent of caffeine in the body. Thus, any
residual confounding related to coffee drinking would tend to produce an
inverse smoking-cirrhosis relation, not the positive one we obtained."

The study was also limited by its reliance on baseline ascertainment of
habits and incomplete follow-up of the cohort.

Finally, the "observational nature of the data and the absence of an
established mechanism limit a causal interpretation." The data suggested
that the need for "research about hepatic coffee-ethanol interactions is
warranted, but we should keep in mind that coffee might represent only
one of a number of potential cirrhosis risk modulators."

Primary source: Archives of Internal Medicine
Source reference:
Klatsky, AL et al "Coffee, Cirrhosis, and Transaminase Enzymes" Arch
Intern Med 2006;166:1190-1195

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