Coffee Consumption Associated with Reduced Risk of Heart Failure

Written by Chrystal Moulton, Staff Writer. Caffeinated coffee intake was significantly associated with a reduced risk of heart failure.

Despite reduction in coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke mortality rates, incidence of heart failure and its associated cost continued to rise ^1,2.  Risk factors have already been identified and incorporated in the cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk model ³. However, these models are based on a traditional hypothesis-driven practice in epidemiology that select factors for evaluation based on clinical expertise. This approach, although effective, excludes other potential factors that could be linked to coronary heart disease (CHD), heart failure, and stroke ⁴. Computer based learning is an unbiased approach that can capture unidentified factors linked to coronary heart disease (CHD), heart failure, and stroke. The purpose of this study was to use machine-learning to uncover other factors, besides those already identified, that could be linked to CHD, stroke, and heart failure through a data analytics focus ⁵.

Researchers selected the Framingham Heart study (FHS), Cardiovascular Heart Study (CHS), and the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study (ARIC) as the source of data for this analysis. The aforementioned studies are all longitudinal studies investigating the survival rate, incidents, and factors contributing to cardiovascular disease (CVD). These studies were community based and included at least 10 years of follow up. The primary outcome of the studies was the time to the incident of stroke, heart failure, and CHD. Researchers selected 204 variables from the Framingham heart study (FHS) exam 14 for their analysis. Only patients without missing data for any of the 204 variables were included in this analysis. Random forest analysis was used for identifying patient characteristics important for predicting the incident of heart failure, stroke, and CHD. Additional analysis of variables ranked within the top 20% based on important scores (generated through random forest analysis) were further assessed to control for collinearity and potential confounding elements.

For CHD, stroke, and heart failure, 35 common risk factors ranked in the top 20% of important features were identified. Common risk factors included known risks such as age, cholesterol, and blood pressure. Dietary factors such as red meat, alcohol, cheese, whole milk, decaffeinated coffee, and caffeinated coffee were also ranked in the top 20% of most important risks for CVD. Further evaluation into dietary factors showed that coffee consumption was associated with a reduced incidence of heart failure and stroke. Further adjustments for the FHS CVD risk score and data validation maintained a significant inverse association between incidence of heart failure and caffeine consumption (HR = 0.95 per cup/day, P=0.03). [see table 1]

Table 1. Association between coffee consumption and stroke, CHD, Heart failure

Even further investigation on coffee consumption showed that decaffeinated coffee was significantly associated with an increased risk of heart failure based on the data from the Framingham Heart Study [FHS] (P = 0.004).  Furthermore, data from the CHS, ARIC, and FHS all demonstrated increased caffeine consumption was significantly and inversely associated with a reduced risk of heart failure in both multi-variable analysis (P = 0.01) and univariable analysis (P = 0.02).

In all, the computer-based analysis of data from the FHS, CHS, and ARIC studies showed that people who drank caffeinated coffee had a lower long-term risk of having heart failure. Although the mechanism by which this relationship is established remains unknown, caffeine was shown to be a key contributor. Further analysis will be needed to understand the relationship between caffeine consumption and the incidence of heart failure.

Source: Stevens, Laura M., Erik Linstead, Jennifer L. Hall, and David P. Kao. “Association Between Coffee Intake and Incident Heart Failure Risk: A Machine Learning Analysis of the FHS, the ARIC Study, and the CHS.” Circulation: Heart Failure 14, no. 2 (2021): e006799.

© 2021 American Heart Association, Inc. Circulation: Heart Failure is available at www.ahajournals.org/journal/circheartfailure

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Posted June 17, 2021.

Chrystal Moulton BA, PMP, is a 2008 graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago. She graduated with a bachelor’s in psychology with a focus on premedical studies and is a licensed project manager. She currently resides in Indianapolis, IN.

Reference:

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3. Goff DC, Jr., Lloyd-Jones DM, Bennett G, et al. 2013 ACC/AHA guideline on the assessment of cardiovascular risk: a report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on Practice Guidelines. Circulation. 2014;129(25 Suppl 2):S49-73.
4. Oakden-Rayner L, Carneiro G, Bessen T, Nascimento JC, Bradley AP, Palmer LJ. Precision Radiology: Predicting longevity using feature engineering and deep learning methods in a radiomics framework. Sci Rep. 2017;7(1):1648.
5. Stevens LM, Linstead E, Hall JL, Kao DP. Association Between Coffee Intake and Incident Heart Failure Risk: A Machine Learning Analysis of the FHS, the ARIC Study, and the CHS. Circulation Heart failure. 2021;14(2):e006799.