Risk of atrial fibrillation associated with coffee intake: Findings from the Danish Diet, Cancer, and Health study

Abstract

Background: There have been discrepant findings on whether coffee consumption is associated with the rate of developing atrial fibrillation (AF).

Methods and results: We used data on 57,053 participants (27,178 men and 29,875 women) aged 50-64 years in the Danish Diet, Cancer and Health study. All participants provided information on coffee intake via food-frequency questionnaires at baseline. Incident AF was identified using nationwide registries. During a median follow-up of 13.5 years, 3415 AF events occurred. Compared with no intake, coffee consumption was inversely associated with AF incidence, with multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios of 0.93 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.74-1.15) for more than none to <1 cup/day, 0.88 (95% CI 0.71-1.10) for 1 cup/day, 0.86 (95% CI 0.71-1.04) for 2-3 cups/day, 0.84 (95% CI 0.69-1.02) for 4-5 cups/day, 0.79 (95% CI 0.64-0.98) for 6-7 cups/day and 0.79 (95% CI 0.63-1.00) for >7 cups/day (p-linear trend = 0.02).

Conclusions: In this large population-based cohort study, higher levels of coffee consumption were associated with a lower rate of incident AF.

Keywords: Epidemiology; arrhythmias; clinical electrophysiology; drugs; nutrition.

Figure

Restricted cubic spline of the incidence rate ratio and 95% confidence interval for the association between atrial fibrillation and caffeine per day across the full range of caffeine intake. Reference value is median caffeine intake for participants in the 5^th percentile of intake (118 mg/d). Figure Legend Multivariable-adjusted IRRs for incident AF according to caffeine intake. IRRs were adjusted for sex, body mass index (BMI; in kg/m²), systolic blood pressure (mm Hg), total serum cholesterol (continuous), alcohol consumption (grams/day), smoking status (never, former, current) and years of education beyond elementary school (0, <3, 3–4, >4 years), diagnosis of hypertension (yes/no), diabetes mellitus (yes/no) and cardiovascular disease (yes/no). The dashed line represents the 95% confidence interval for the estimated hazard ratio.