Coffee consumption and risk of coronary heart diseases: a meta-analysis of 21 prospective cohort studies.
BACKGROUND
A large amount of cohort studies addressed coffee consumption and risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) and yielded inconsistent results. We conducted a meta-analysis to estimate the pooling effects.


METHODS
We searched for all published English articles indexed in MEDLINE or PubMed from January 1966 to January 2008. Twenty-one independent prospective cohort studies, which tested CHD risk by coffee consumption, were identified. A general variance-based method was used to pool the relative risks (RR). 15,599 cases from 407,806 participants were included in pooling the overall effects.


RESULTS
As compared to the light coffee consumption (<1 cup/d in US or <or=2 cups/d in Europe), under the random-effects model, the pooled CHD RRs (95% CI) for all studies combined were 0.96 (0.87-1.06), 1.04 (0.92-1.17) and 1.07 (0.87-1.32) for the moderate (1-3 or 3-4 cups/d), heavy (4-5 or 5-6 cups/d) and very heavy (>or=6 or >or=7 cups/d) categories of coffee consumption (all p>0.05); Moderate coffee consumption showed significantly lower CHD RR (95% CI) of 0.82 (0.73-0.92) (p<0.001) in women, and of 0.87 (0.80-0.86) (p=0.001) in men and women followed <or=10 years.


CONCLUSIONS
Our findings do not support the hypothesis that coffee consumption increases the long-term risk of coronary heart disease. Habitual moderate coffee drinking was associated with a lower risk of CHD in women.
Wu
Jiang-nan
JN
Department of Medical Statistics & Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.
Ho
Suzanne C
SC
Zhou
Chun
C
Ling
Wen-hua
WH
Chen
Wei-qing
WQ
Wang
Cui-ling
CL
Chen
Yu-ming
YM
D002110:Caffeine / Q000494:pharmacology; D003069:Coffee / Q000009:adverse effects*; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D003327:Coronary Disease / Q000209:etiology* / Q000517:prevention & control; D005060:Europe; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016018:Least-Squares Analysis; D008297:Male; D011446:Prospective Studies; D012306:Risk; D012737:Sex Factors; D014481:United States
D003069:Coffee; D002110:Caffeine