Increasing coffee intake can protect your liver and help with liver-related deaths, according to a recent report published in Food Pharmacology and Therapeutics. A group of researchers in Australia looked at data from previous studies involving coffee and liver disease and found that drinking more than two cups of coffee a day can protect against deaths related to liver disease.
“Increasing coffee consumption by coffee to> 2 cups per day at a population level has the potential to prevent hundreds of thousands of liver-related deaths annually if the impact of coffee on liver-related mortality is confirmed in clinical trials,” wrote Sarah Gardner of the liver transplant unit at The Austin Hospital in Australia in the study.
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Gardner and her colleagues refer to previous research results that said, “Compared to non-coffee drinkers, those who drank 2-3 cups every day had a 38% reduction in HCC [hepatocellular carcinoma] risk and a 46% reduction in risk of dying from chronic liver disease (CLD). If individuals drank four or more cups each day, the risk reduction for HCC was 41% and for deaths from CLD 71%. Other cohort studies have reported risk reductions of similar magnitude. ”
The Australian team of researchers decided to estimate the potential impact that increased coffee consumption would have on global liver-related mortality. They looked at the effect of consuming more than two cups and would have more than four cups / day per head on liver-related deaths. The researchers used the Global Burden of Disease 2016 datasets for 194 countries to model the impact with risk ratios from a published study
Gardner and colleagues found that if all countries had increased per coffee intake from less than two to more than two cups of coffee per day, the predicted number of liver-related deaths in 2016 would have been 630,947, with 452,861 deaths occurring. If the coffee consumed per capita were greater than four cups per day, the predicted number of liver-related deaths in 2016 would have been 360,523 with 723,287 deaths, according to the study. Globally, the total number of liver-related deaths in 2016 was an estimated 1,240,201, the authors said.
“Coffee helps your liver clear,” Drs. Douglas Dieterich, a hepatologist at Mount Sinai Division of Liver Medicine and Gastroenterology, told Fox News. “This study shows the impact on a larger scale of previous studies[ that demonstrated benefits of coffee]. “
Dieterich also said he recommends coffee for some of his patients, noting that it can help with certain liver diseases.
“Coffee is also good for Primary Biliary Cholangitis (PBC),” an autoimmune liver disease that affects the bile ducts and can lead to cirrhosis, he said.
“The mechanism by which coffee provides protection against liver disease has not been clearly demonstrated, but it appears that caffeine is not the protective chemical. Of the many compounds in coffee, diterpenes and chlorogenic acids are the most studied in liver disease, “the study authors said.
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“High coffee consumption has been correlated with improved insulin sensitivity, suggesting that coffee may exert protective effects through attenuation of insulin-induced liver fibrosis and / or NAFLD as a co-factor in progression of liver disease,” she added.
Based on their data, the researchers said that coffee is an easily accessible and relatively safe health intervention that can reduce global liver-related mortality. That said, the Australian research team said further research is needed to confirm the benefits of coffee on liver-related mortality.