A new study has unveiled that drinking at least a cup of coffee per day might make you move more but sleep less — and it might put a person at higher risk for one type of heart palpitation.
New findings from a small study published in The New England Journal of Medicine stated, “The big picture finding is that there isn’t just one single health-related consequence of consuming coffee, but that the reality is more complicated than that.”
The study’s lead author, Dr. Gregory Marcus, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco sid, “The great majority of research on the topic has been observational, meaning we just look and see at what happens to people who do and don’t drink coffee, which is profoundly limited by the possibility that … there may be some other characteristic that is driving whether someone happens to drink coffee,” Marcus said. “The only way to mitigate those potential effects was to conduct a randomized interventional trial.”
To get a better idea of coffee’s immediate health effects, the authors recruited 100 healthy adults who were age 39 on average and from the San Francisco area. They equipped the participants with Fitbits to track their steps and sleep, continuous blood glucose monitors and electrocardiogram devices that tracked their heart rhythms. Each participant was randomly assigned to drink as much coffee as they wanted for two days, then abstain for two days, repeating that cycle over a two-week period.
On coffee-drinking days, participants got an average of 1,058 more steps than they did on abstention days, the authors found. But on those days, sleep took a hit, with participants getting 36 fewer minutes of shut-eye. The more coffee they drank, the more physical activity and the less sleep they got.
Coffee seemed to affect the heart, too. Researchers found no evidence of a significant relationship between coffee consumption and premature atrial contractions, which are “very common, early heartbeats that we all experience arising from the top chambers of the heart,” Marcus said. They can feel like a flutter or skipped beat in your chest.
“People with more premature atrial contractions are at higher risk of developing a very clinically significant heart rhythm disturbance called atrial fibrillation,” he added.
However, drinking more than one cup per day resulted in about a 50% higher incidence of premature ventricular contractions, or PVCs, compared with days of no coffee intake. These heartbeats arise from the lower chambers of the heart, and they can also feel like a skipped beat or heart palpitations.
