Study Says Coffee Protects Against Cirrhosis

An anonymous reader writes "Good news for those who like both coffee and alcohol. In a recent study of more than 125,000 people an Oakland, CA medical team found that consuming coffee seems to help protect against alcoholic cirrhosis. The study was done based on people enrolled in a private northern California health care plan between 1978 and 1985." From the article: "People drinking one cup of coffee per day were, on average, 20% less likely to develop alcoholic cirrhosis. For people drinking two or three cups the reduction was 40%, and for those drinking four or more cups of coffee a day the reduction in risk was 80%."

Comments

Fox coverage

[WinEveryGame]

I just heard unbelievably bad coverage on this report on Fox. The "expert" said:

This report proves coffee is good, and tea is bad

hmm.. perhaps Starbucks is involved somewhere..

Cirrhosis specifics

[Morinaga]

I'm not too proud to admit I wasn't sure exactly what Cirrhosis of the liver was despite hearing the jargon several times in the past. Here's some reference.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cirrhosis/DS00373
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_liver_cirrh osis

Re:Study with 21 year old data?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it's called a "longitudinal" study...

Re:Study with 21 year old data?

[grasshoppa]

It's kind of hard to study long term effects of something with a short term sample size.

You do raise a good point, however: How do we know it's not something else that happened in that time? That's why you look at large numbers and correlations between those numbers. That's also why it's not absolute or definite. Coffee is linked to this, but it's not set it stone. More studies and experiments will need to be done to determine what, if anything, caused this condition.