Good News for Coffee Drinking Boozers (like me)

Finally, somebody has offered scientific support for my lifestyle.

Actually, I don't drink all that much (isn't that what we all say?). Still, I was heartened to read this evening in the latest Annals of Internal Medicine that people who drink lots of coffee and are prone to cirrhosis of the liver because of heavy drinking are much less likely to come down with the disease than people who choose tea and other methods of keeping hangovers at bay.

According to researchers Arthur Klatsky and colleagues at Kaiser Permanente Medical Program in Oakland, California, heavy drinkers who drink four or more cups of coffee a day (how did they know?) have just 20 percent of the risk of developing liver cirrhosis compared to people who do not drink coffee. The same was true for people who are not heavy drinkers but develop liver cirrhosis, a rarer phenomenon. However, the results in the latter case were not statistically significant. Still, "these data support the hypothesis that there is an ingredient in coffee that protects against cirrhosis, especially alcoholic cirrhosis," the researchers concluded.

Of course, as part of my campaign to always report absolute risk as well as relative risk, this good news is leavened by the fact that just a shade under 200 of the 125,000 people interviewed for the study developed cirrhosis of the liver due to alcoholism. So while a reduction of 80 percent sounds good, the odds for most people of contracting the disease are fairly low - especially if they are moderate drinkers.