People with heart failure suffer fatigue and shortness of breath and have trouble walking, climbing stairs or other daily activities, experts say.

The study authors, led by the Assistant Professor of Cardiology and Medical Director at the Colorado Centre for Personalised Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, Colorado, David P. Kao, used machine learning feature selection based on random forest analysis to identify potential risk factors associated with coronary heart disease, stroke, and heart failure in Framingham Heart Study.

According to them, drinking decaffeinated coffee, on the other hand, significantly increased the risk of heart failure for those in the Framingham study, while having no impact on those in the Cardiovascular Health Study.

The original Framingham Heart Study began in 1948, enrolled over 5,000 people with no diagnosed heart disease who lived in Framingham, Massachusetts. The study has followed those people and their offspring for 72 years over three generations.

On the other hand, the Cardiovascular Health Study was a 10-year-long study of cardiovascular risk in adults over 65. Altogether, the studies provided dietary information on more than 21,000 adult Americans.

“Higher coffee consumption and caffeine intake were associated with reduced risk of heart in three large, well-known epidemiological studies, although decaffeinated coffee was not. Further study is warranted to better define the mechanism and role of coffee consumption as a potential modifiable risk factor for heart failure,” the researchers said.

To analyse the outcomes of drinking caffeinated coffee, researchers categorised consumption from zero cups per day to three cups per day.

The authors concluded that “higher coffee intake was found to be associated with reduced risk of heart failure in all three studies.”

They added that machine learning feature selection identified coffee consumption as an important risk factor for subsequent development of heart failure.

Reacting to the study, medical experts in Nigeria say there is not yet enough evidence to recommend drinking caffeinated coffee to reduce heart failure risk.

According to the Nigerians, there is the need for more research to establish a definite causality between coffee intake and decrease in the long-term risk of heart failure.

One of the respondents, a public health physician and Director, Policy, and Advocacy at the Nigeria Health Watch, Dr. Ifeanyi Nsofor, said there was need for more research to establish a definite causality between coffee intake and decreased long-term risk of heart failure.

“More research needs to be done to establish a definite causality between coffee intake and decrease in long-term risk of heart failure. I will not push this out to the public yet.

“I will take that with a pinch of salt because there are so many confounders that could contribute to the outcome of the study because those people were already on a healthy diet.

“So, the observed improvement in blood pressure is not necessarily because of coffee but because, in addition to taking coffee, they were eating well.

“There are so many variables because once you put out this kind of information out there, what you are invariably saying to people is that you can drink coffee and have good blood pressure; but it is not true.

“You can’t be drinking coffee and eating unhealthy foods and not come down with hypertension and other things that increase blood pressure.”

Also, a Consultant Family Physician and Head of Department, Family Medicine Department at the University of Ilorin, Dr. Ibrahim Kuranga-Suleiman, said the study was not a causality one.

“The study is not a causality study; you can’t conclude that taking caffeinated coffee is associated with reduced risk of heart failure, and there is the need for more research,” Kuranga-Suleiman said.

This is in tune with the researchers’ statement.

“Further study is warranted to better define the role, possible causality, and potential mechanism of coffee consumption as a potential modifiable risk factor for heart failure,” the study authors said.

source: Punch