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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