Study:
Cutting coffee
lowers stroke risks

The study was conducted
on more than 8,000 Japanese
Americans in Hawaii

By Helen Altonn
Star-Bulletin

Men 55 and older who are hypertensive and drink a lot of coffee probably should cut back to one cup a day, a researcher with the Honolulu Heart Program said today.

Drinking three cups of coffee or more daily tended to increase the risk factor for stroke in studies of men who had high blood pressure, said Dr. Robert Abbott, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

"Coffee doesn't seem to be a risk factor for those men who are healthy and younger -- just in older men where stroke becomes a major public health problem, particularly among men with hypertension," he said today.

Abbott and colleagues in the Honolulu program have made a number of discoveries about heart disease, stroke and aging through research on 8,006 Japanese-American men recruited in 1965.

Abbott, 48, doing research here this summer on sabbatical leave, said he cut his own coffee intake from two cups to one a day after studying men who might be at greater risk for stroke.

He said the study was prompted by an "outrageous" statement in a major medical journal about a year ago that a significant percentage of strokes can be attributed to coffee intake.

The researchers examined 499 men 55 to 68 years old who were in the heart program between 1965 and 1968. Of those, 76 had a stroke in a 25-year period.

Coffee intake wasn't related to stroke or coronary heart disease for healthy men without hypertension, but it tended to increase risks of those who were hypertensive, he said.

The group's findings were reported in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.