The following is the summary of “Association Between Coffee Consumption and Incident Atrial Fibrillation (from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis [MESA]),” published in the January 2023 issue of Cardiovascular Disease by Sehrawat et al.

This study aimed to determine whether or not there is a multi-ethnic, dose-dependent association between coffee consumption and the development of atrial fibrillation (AF). Prior research has mostly involved White people and has only scratched the surface of dosage dependency. To fill in the blanks, we evaluated data from the prospective cohort study, the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. Researchers grouped patients into three categories for the primary analysis: never drinkers, drinkers of 1-3 cups/month, and drinkers of ≥1 cup/week. To do the secondary analysis, researchers divided the cohort into 9 groups based on their average daily coffee use. 

Only 6 primary confounders were considered in a multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression model: age, gender, smoking, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and alcohol consumption. The adjusted hazard ratio for AF was 1.40 times greater in subjects who consumed at least one cup of coffee per week than those who did not (P=0.015). Moreover, in the secondary analysis, the adjusted hazard ratio increased with increasing doses of coffee in the groups with 1–3 cups/month, 2–4 cups/week, 2–3 cups/day, and ≥6 cups/day, but this trend was not continuous. 

The group that drank the most coffee, defined as more than ≥6 cups per day, had the highest incidence of atrial fibrillation (9.8%; P=0.02). Race and ethnicity subgroup analysis revealed that Whites and Hispanics, rather than African-Americans and Asian Americans, may primarily influence the findings. In conclusion, the results are inconsistent with the majority of previous studies by suggesting a link between coffee consumption and incident AF.

Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002914922011201