Genes decide if coffee hurts or helps your heart

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

Is coffee good for you or bad for you? It depends. From Genes decide if coffee hurts or helps your heart:

Coffee can raise or reduce your chances of suffering a heart attack — it all depends on your genes, researchers suggest.

People with a genetic makeup that causes them to metabolise caffeine more slowly have a 36% greater risk of heart attack if they drink two to three cups of coffee a day than people with the same gene who drink one cup or less a day, according to a new study. And if they drink more than four cups, this risk rises to 64%.

“Our data suggest that the longer caffeine is lingering in the system, the more harm it can do,” says Ahmed El-Sohemy at the University of Toronto, Canada, who led the study.

On the other hand, individuals who metabolised caffeine quickly and consumed two to three cups of coffee a day had a 22% reduction in the risk of heart attack compared with those with the same genetic makeup who consumed just one cup or less each day.
[...]
People who carry two copies of the CYP1A2*1A gene may break down caffeine up to four times faster than those carrying the CYP1A2*1F gene, according to El-Sohemy.

Leave a Reply