Your daily cup of coffee may lower your risk for liver disease or liver cancer, a large new study has found — even if you drink five or more cups a day.
The findings are based on more than 354,000 participants whom researchers followed for more than a decade, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
“This is probably the most comprehensive long-term follow-up data of the coffee’s impact,” said first study author Dr. Hyunseok Kim, a transplant hepatologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “We do see that probably, the liver benefit from the coffee is not from the caffeine, because we do see the similar benefit in the decaffeinated drinkers. So it seems more related to the anti-oxidative effect of the coffee.”
In the study, the researchers measured liver disease by the number of cases of cirrhosis — permanent liver scarring and damage that can result from several long-term liver diseases, including fatty liver disease, viral hepatitis, alcohol-related liver disease and more, especially when untreated. Cirrhosis affects more than 58 million people worldwide, and it kills nearly 1.5 million people worldwide yearly.
Hepatocellular carcinoma, the type of liver cancer the authors measured, is the most common liver cancer, with nearly 685,000 cases and more than 597,000 deaths occurring globally every year.
