Scientists have found many ways coffee aids your health, from stronger teeth to diabetes prevention and eye health. (It also has the power to turn some people from a cranky sour puss in the morning into a pleasant person.)
As if you needed another reason to feel good about getting your daily coffee fix, a new research study suggests that coffee may be good for your hearing, too.
Women who drank two or more cups of coffee a day had a lower chance of having tinnitus, a ringing or buzzing sound in the ear, a new study published in the American Journal of Medicine found. A research team led by Gary Curhan, MD, ScD, a physician-researcher in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at BWH, studied more than 65,000 American women aged 30 to 44. They chose women who did not have tinnitus when the study began in 1991, and then followed them for 18 years.
During the course of the study, about 5,300 cases of tinnitus were reported in the study group. The researchers found that women who drank less than 150 mg of caffeine a day (the equivalent of one and a half 8-ounce cups of coffee) were 15% more likely to get tinnitus than women who drank 450 to 599 mg of caffeine a day, the equivalent of four-and-a half to six cups of coffee.
Most of the caffeine drank by women in the study came from coffee, but not all of it.
Dr. Curhan said it was not clear why a higher amount of caffeine consumption might correlate with reduced cases of tinnitus.
"We know that caffeine stimulates the central nervous system, and previous research has demonstrated that caffeine has a direct effect on the inner ear in both bench science and animal studies," he said.
The researchers emphasized in the study that their findings did not prove a cause and effect between increased caffeine consumption and reduced tinnitus. The findings would need to be repeated in a larger study and further studied. However, this study is promising for those who were warned by doctors in the past that excessive caffeine consumption would worsen their tinnitus. The American Tinnitus Association (ATA) says that although there are many subjective accounts of caffeine worsening tinnitus, there is no scientific evidence to prove that cutting caffeine will improve the condition. In fact, in 2010, a UK research study showed that caffeine consumption had no scientific effect on tinnitus one way or the other.
In other words: more research needs to be done, but evidence is piling up that shows that having a few cups of coffee won't worsen tinnitus, and may aid prevention.
