Daily HealthBeat Tip

Another cup of coffee?

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Coffee can perk you up. But can drinking it regularly give you long-lasting high blood pressure? Researchers looked into that because caffeine can make blood pressure rise for a while.

At Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. Wolfgang Winkelmayer examined data on almost 156-thousand women. His study in the Journal of the American Medical Association was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Winkelmayer’s findings should calm folks’ coffee nerves:

"Coffee drinking was not at all associated with a greater risk of high blood pressure. If anything, coffee drinking was associated with a preventive effect, in that women who drank more coffee were less likely to have high blood pressure.’’ (13 seconds)

The study linked cola drinking with high blood pressure, but Winkelmayer isn’t sure what to make of that yet, and is not recommending people give up soda because of it.

Learn more at www.hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: December 28, 2005

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