Heart Disease: Effects of Caffeine

Transcript

Well, I always joke and say, caffeine saves life. If your pilot falls asleep or your doctor’s asleep, you may not make it. But caffeine has good properties and caffeine could have potentially bad properties. I, myself can’t live without caffeine. So I drink a cup of coffee every day. But when you drink more than one cup of coffee daily, you might get some benefits for certain conditions. But in general, when we talk about the heart, it tends to raise heart rate and raise blood pressure. And those patients that have arrhythmias particularly, they can increase their frequency and intensity of their arrhythmias. So in general, I try to tell my patients to limit caffeine intake to at least one cup or less daily. Those patients that have arrhythmias, I tell them to not drink any caffeine at all, and to use not caffeinated products rather than decaffeinated products. Cause something most patients don’t understand is decaf doesn’t mean no caf. It means less caf and caffeine is still a problem for those patients that have arrhythmias.