Caffeine cut lowers blood pressure
By Lidia Wasowicz
REDWOOD CITY, California (UPI): Cutting back on caffeinated coffee can lower blood pressure by as much as 5 percent, researchers reported recently.
The study, published in the American Journal of Cardiology, found a decrease in coffee consumption lowered blood pressure levels during normal workday activities.
"Our findings are especially important for those individuals bordering on hypertension and presumably also for hypertensive individuals who wish to control their blood pressure without medication," said Robert Superko, director of the Lipid Institute at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, California, and medical director of the Cholesterol Research Center at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
"Cutting down on caffeinated coffee can be easily incorporated into a healthier lifestyle to produce highly beneficial results for people at risk for heart disease," he added.
The benefits were achieved by switching to decaffeinated coffee or not drinking the popular morning pick-me-up at all, according to results of the first such government-funded study.
Daily activities
The survey of men who normally drank four to six cups a day also was the first to specifically analyze the effects of caffeinated coffee on blood pressure during regular daily activities -- rather than in a controlled laboratory, the setting for previous surveys.
The current treatments for high blood pressure vary from diuretic medications, calcium antagonists and beta-blockers to ace inhibitors, which involve a restrictive dietary regimen or an exercise program.
The four-month study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, analyzed 186 middle-aged male coffee drinkers with normal blood pressure. For two months, the subjects drank three to six cups of caffeinated coffee daily. For the last two months, one group continued to drink that amount, while a second group switched to decaf, and a third stopped drinking coffee altogether.
The researchers found the latter two groups showed significant blood pressure decreases between 9 a.m. and noon and between noon and 3 p.m. Smaller but still significant drops in the subjects abstaining from caffeinated coffee were seen between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m.
"By taking blood pressure measurements during the course of everyday activities and not in a controlled laboratory environment, we replicated day-to-day functioning of ordinary people conducting regular daily activities," Superko said.
"Our findings are significant because they suggest a simple lifestyle change may provide a way to deal with hypertension, one of the risk factors in coronary heart disease."