NEW YORK - Women with heart disease who down a few cups of coffee each day tend to live as long as those who avoid the drink, according to a study.

The results, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, add to existing findings, mixed in their conclusions, on whether coffee with caffeine is a hazard for people who are at a high risk of suffering cardiovascular troubles.

The study, which followed nearly 12,000 US nurses who have a history of heart disease or stroke, found that those who regularly drank caffeinated coffee were no more likely to die than non-coffee drinkers during the study period, which spanned more than 20 years for some participants.

In fact, no link was found between a woman's intake of coffee and her risk of death from heart attacks, strokes or other causes - and this was true even of women who drank four or more cups of coffee a day.

"Our results suggest that coffee drinking is okay for patients with cardiovascular disease, but it would be desirable to replicate our results in other populations," said the lead researcher, Esther Lopez-Garcia of Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain.

The results came from the long-running Nurses' Health Study, which began tracking more than 100,000 female nurses in 1976. The researchers looked at 11,697 women who developed heart disease or had a stroke sometime between 1976 and 2002.

Of those women, 62 percent continued to drink caffeinated coffee after their diagnosis.

By 2004, 1,159 of the women had died, showing that the risk of dying was no greater among coffee drinkers than among non-drinkers.

One possible explanation of the somewhat surprising result is that the women in relatively worse health avoided caffeinated coffee, the study authors noted. Still, they found no evidence that directly connected the outcome to changes the women had made in their intake of coffee after they had experienced heart complications or a stroke.

Reuters

(China Daily 06/14/2011 page10)