Drinking tea
reduces non-cardiovascular mortality by 24%, reveals a study in 131 000 people
presented at ESC Congress September 2, 2014 by Professor Nicolas Danchin from France.
Professor
Danchin said: "If you have to choose between tea or coffee it's probably
better to drink tea. Coffee and tea are important components of our way of
life. Their effects on cardiovascular (CV) health have been investigated in the
past with sometimes divergent results. We investigated the effects of coffee
and tea on CV mortality and non-CV mortality in a large French population at
low risk of cardiovascular diseases."
The study
included 131 401 people aged 18 to 95 years who had a health check up at the
Paris IPC Preventive Medicine Center between January 2001 and December 2008.
During a mean 3.5 years follow up there were 95 deaths from CV and 632 deaths
from non-CV causes. Coffee or tea consumption was assessed by a
self-administered questionnaire as one of three classes: none, 1 to 4, or more
than 4 cups per day.
The researchers
found that coffee drinkers had a higher CV risk profile than non-drinkers,
particularly for smoking. The percentage of current smokers was 17% for
non-drinkers compared with 31% in those who drank 1 to 4 cups per day and 57%
in those who drank more than 4 cups per day.
Non-coffee
drinkers were more physically active, with 45% having a good level of physical
activity compared to 41% of the heavy coffee drinkers. Professor Danchin said:
"This is highly significant in our large population."
Heavy drinkers
of coffee were older than the non-drinkers, with a mean age of 44 compared to
40 years. The differences in blood pressure were small, with heavy coffee
drinkers having a slightly lower systolic blood pressure (SBP) and higher
diastolic blood pressure (DBP) compared to non-drinkers when adjusted for age.
Tea drinkers had
the reverse profile of coffee drinkers, with consumers having a better CV risk
profile than non-consumers. One-third (34%) of the non-drinkers of tea were
current smokers compared to 24% of those who drank 1-4 cups per day and 29% of
those who drank more than 4 cups. Physical activity increased with the number
of cups of tea per day from 43% in the moderate tea drinkers to 46% in the
heavy drinkers.
Tea had a more
marked effect on blood pressure than coffee, with a 4-5 mmHg decrease in SBP
and 3 mmHg decrease in DBP in the heavy tea drinkers, compared to non-drinkers,
when adjusted for age.
Professor
Danchin said: "Overall we tend to have a higher risk profile for coffee
drinkers and a lower risk profile for tea drinkers. We also found big
differences with gender. Men tend to drink coffee much more than women, while
women tend to drink more tea than men."
Coffee showed a
trend for increasing CV mortality in the heavy compared to non-drinkers but the
effect was not significant. Coffee significantly increased non-CV mortality but
the increased risk disappeared when the effect was adjusted for smoking.
Professor Danchin said: "The trend for higher mortality in coffee drinkers
is probably largely explained by the fact that there are more smokers in the
group who drink a lot of coffee."
There was a
trend for tea drinking to decrease CV mortality but the effect was not quite
significant after adjusting for age, gender and smoking. But tea significantly
lowered the risk of non-CV death, with a hazard ratio of 0.76 for tea drinkers
compared with no tea at all.
Professor
Danchin said: "Tea drinking lowered the risk of non-CV death by 24% and
the trend towards lowering CV mortality was nearly significant. When we
extended our analysis to 2011 we found that tea continued to reduce overall
mortality during the 6 year period. Interestingly, most of the effect of tea on
non-CV mortality was found in current or ex-smokers, while tea had a neutral
effect in non-smokers."
He concluded:
"Tea has antioxidants which may provide survival benefits. Tea drinkers
also have healthier lifestyles so does tea drinking reflect a particular person
profile or is it tea, per se, that improves outcomes - for me that remains an
open question. Pending the answer to that question, I think that you could
fairly honestly recommend tea drinking rather than coffee drinking and even
rather than not drinking anything at all."
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