Does coffee help to reduce the risk of a stroke?
Recently there have been reports in the news that coffee has certain unexpected health benefits. In particular, those who consume a couple of cups of the caffeine elixir on a daily basis may, it appears, have a reduced chance of suffering from a stroke.
The search results were collated, it was revealed, by a ‘systematic review’ of 11 studies which had been carried out previously. The observations when analysing this data concluded that those subjects who had a low or minimal coffee intake had a higher risk of suffering a stroke. The research was undertaken in the Swedish Karolinska Institute, funded by the national Council for Working Life and Social Research and the institute itself.
Of course, given the way that the research was set up, the results of the research are not conclusive in proving that coffee does lower the risk of strokes – but rather that there is some sort of relationship between coffee and strokes. More investigations need to be undertaken to take matters further.
The Swedish project had certain limitations. For example, subjects were only asked about their coffee drinking habits at the outset of the study and then during a follow up a couple of decades later. Also, the form of the research was a ‘meta-analysis’ – this means a sort of ‘overview’ of the results of previous studies. The benefit of this sort of analysis is that, in this case, almost 480,000 participants were considered. From this bird’s eye view, sometimes trends or connections can be spotted and used in future, more detailed individual research projects.