Fellow coffee and tea lovers, rejoice ― our beloved beverages may help us to manage our heart health.
At least, that’s according to a new study published in the journal Rheumatology yesterday.
Sapienza University of Rome researchers asked 31 participants who have lupus to answer questionnaires about their dietary intake.
Lupus is an inflammatory rheumatic disease, like rheumatoid arthritis. Conditions like those can increase your risk of stroke and heart disease.
Scientists think that caffeine found in tea and coffee might help to reduce those risks and want to conduct further research to see whether or not it really does work.
Why?
According to study leader Dr Fulvia Ceccarelli, “Besides the well-known stimulant effect on the body, caffeine also exerts an anti-inflammatory effect because it binds with the receptors expressed on the surface of immune cells.”
After tracking study participants’ food and caffeine consumption for a week, they took their blood to see how their consumption affected their cardiovascular health.
They were looking to see how healthy their endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) were. These are the cells responsible for repairing and maintaining blood vessel walls.
The researchers found a positive link between caffeine intake and a person’s amount of circulating EPCs.
The team wanted to find out more about that link, so they took EPC cells from people without lupus, treated these cells with serum from lupus patients to mimic the effects of the disease, and then added caffeine.
They found that caffeine helped improve the shape of the cells, increased the number of healthy cells, and reduced the number of cells dying.
Caffeine also seemed to help the cells work better by boosting a process called autophagy, which is how cells clean out damaged parts.
Does this mean coffee definitely helps heart health?
In short, no.
Researcher Dr Ceccarelli said that the small study was just a jumping-off point for further research.
“The present study is an attempt to provide patients with information on the possible role of diet in controlling the disease,” she said.
She added: “It will be necessary to confirm the results through a longitudinal study, aimed at assessing the real impact of coffee consumption on the disease course.”