Couples’ pre-pregnancy coffee consumption linked to miscarriage risk

Two cups could reduce likelihood of developing prostate cancer by 2.5%

A woman is more likely to miscarry if she and her partner drink more than two caffeinated beverages a day during the weeks leading up to conception, according to a new study from researchers at the National Institutes of Health and Ohio State University, Columbus, United States. Similarly, women who drank more than two daily caffeinated beverages during the first seven weeks of pregnancy were also more likely to miscarry.

However, women who took a daily multivitamin before conception and through early pregnancy were less likely to miscarry than women who did not. The study was published online in Fertility and Sterility.

Meanwhile, drinking coffee could lower the risk of prostate cancer.

New research based on more than 550,000 men worldwide shows that the likelihood of developing the disease decreases by 2.5 per cent for every two additional cups of coffee consumed a day.

Researchers at the Tongji University Hospital in Shanghai analysed the results of 13 studies that had investigated this link and concluded that as well as facing an overall lower risk, coffee drinkers were 24 per cent less likely to die from the disease if diagnosed with it, reports the journal Nutrition And Cancer.

A number of compounds in coffee are thought to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects, including cafestol and kahweol, which have been shown to inhibit cancer cell growth.

The Fertility and Sterility study’s first author, Dr. Germaine Buck Louis, director of the Division of Intramural Population Health Research at United States National Institute for Health (NIH’s), Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said: “Our findings provide useful information for couples who are planning a pregnancy and who would like to minimize their risk for early pregnancy loss.”

The researchers analyzed data from the Longitudinal Investigation of Fertility and the Environment (LIFE) Study, which was established to examine the relationship between fertility, lifestyle and exposure to environmental chemicals. The LIFE Study enrolled 501 couples from four counties in Michigan and 12 counties in Texas, from 2005 to 2009.

For the current study, researchers compared such lifestyle factors as cigarette use, caffeinated beverage consumption and multivitamin use among 344 couples with a singleton pregnancy from the weeks before they conceived through the seventh week of pregnancy.

The researchers reported their results using a statistical concept known as a hazard ratio, which estimates the chances of a particular health outcome occurring during the study time frame. For example, the researchers evaluated caffeinated beverage consumption in terms of the daily likelihood of pregnancy loss over a given time period. A score greater than one indicates an increased risk for pregnancy loss each day following conception, and a score less than one indicates a reduced daily risk.

Of the 344 pregnancies, 98 ended in miscarriage, or 28 percent. For the preconception period, miscarriage was associated with female age of 35 or above, for a hazard ratio of 1.96 (nearly twice the miscarriage risk of younger women).