High Caffeine Consumption Disrupts Heart Rhythms

health

Sep 9

In the health and fitness field, there’s always been a lot of discussion about caffeine. Some cardiologists tend to not recommend having more than a couple of cups of coffee a day, lest we agitate our heart rate. Some weightlifters claim caffeine can help push toxins out of the body and away from the heart. Some people swear off all caffeine for personal, or religious, or health reasons — but what is the true take on the benefits of caffeine?

Sometimes, we cannot avoid caffeine. It is in our beans. It is in our medications. Caffeine is even part of a lactated ringer — if you ever need to have an IV stuck in your arm. So, what to do? Do we create a hard line against ingesting any and all free will caffeine, or do we try to go with the flow, and evaluate each moment of acceptance as if it’s our first?

Well, as usual, the answer about voluntary caffeine consumption is — “it depends” — your caffeine fix all relates to your physiology, and your health wants, and your body chemistry, and your intention, and your performance purposes.

However, when new evidence is presented about caffeine and our aging bodies — and that is, after all, the prime directive of this Boles Bells blog (sharing what we know, as we come to know it) — we then need to evaluate the claims, and make adjustments to ourselves, to try to determine the best pathway for proper future footfalls.

The Food and Drug Administration recommends healthy adults not exceed 400 milligrams (mg) of caffeine—approximately four cups of brewed coffee—a day. New research out of the New York Institute of Technology finds that staying within these guidelines is more important as people age.
“The older rats are more vulnerable than younger rats to caffeine induced ventricular tachyarrhythmias,” researchers wrote.
The research team administered an acute dose of caffeine to four experimental groups of younger (5-month-old) and middle-aged (1-year-old) male and female rats. They also gave saline to control groups of the younger rats. The team then monitored the rats’ heart rhythms via electrocardiogram.
Although there is no concrete age conversion of rats to humans, a 5-month-old rat can be considered the rough equivalent of a young adult human. At one year, rats are approximately comparable to early middle age. While similarly, there is no precise conversion for a human equivalent to the rats’ caffeine dose, a starting estimate would be about 13 mg per kilogram of weight—about 880 mg for a person weighing 150 pounds.
After ingesting the caffeine, all except one of the males and all the female middle-aged rats developed ventricular arrhythmias—i.e., abnormal rhythms in the lower chambers of their hearts. Only two younger males and one female developed abnormal heart rhythms. None of the controls developed abnormal rhythms.
These abnormal heart rhythms are temporary, but can hold serious health risks which increase with frequency of the episodes. Heart arrhythmia can cause lightheadedness, loss of consciousness and cardiac arrest.

Okay, so we aren’t rats — well, some of us may well be, but that’s a topic for another discussion — but that doesn’t mean this scientific study doesn’t have benefits of analysis in application. It makes sense that the more caffeine we swallow, the more that caffeine will affect our hearts, and in this case, “the more, the merrier” doesn’t always apply in context.

We need to be conservative, and cautious, as we age when it comes to temporal moments of decision.

Should I take that fifth cup of coffee today? Or is four enough?

The rats have told us.

We can rat out ourselves; and in the drinking, the truth is revealed to the tuneful, and quieted beating, of a non-caffeine addicted heart.

All merriment is in moderation. Science doesn’t have to tell us that for common sense to break through the caffeinated want for just one more cuppa.