Coffee healthy drinking coffee can prevent stroke in women

Coffee drinking reduces stroke risk in women, but it has a reduced effect on stroke prevention in women who smoke regularly, a new study by US and Spanish researchers found.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Madrid Autonomous University said in a press release on the 18th that they reached the above conclusions by analyzing relevant data of more than 83,000 adult women. The women, who participated in a health survey between 1980 and 2004, had no history of stroke, heart disease, diabetes or cancer before the survey began. But nearly 2300 of them had strokes during the 24 years the survey was conducted.

By analyzing the relationship between stroke risk and coffee consumption among the women surveyed, the researchers said they found that coffee affected different groups differently. For women who never smoked, or who smoked but quit, drinking four or more cups of coffee a day reduced their risk of stroke by 43 percent. But for women who smoked, despite drinking the same amount of coffee a day, their risk of stroke decreased by only 3 percent, suggesting that smoking largely offset the stroke-preventing effects of coffee drinking. In addition, the researchers found that the amount of coffee consumed per day also affected the risk of stroke. Women who drank three cups of coffee a day had a 19 percent lower risk of stroke than those who drank less than one cup a month.