Every day, millions of Americans rely on coffee to make it through their work shift without dozing off. Aside from giving you a much-needed energy boost, all that coffee might be good for your health. 

Every Cup Counts? 

According to research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2017, the consumption of coffee could help protect against both heart disease and stroke. Specifically, the report concluded that every cup of coffee consumed reduced stroke risk by 8 percent. For heart disease, this figure stood at 7 percent. 

The report’s authors gleaned their data from the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running project that tracks the heart health of the residents of Framingham, Massachusetts. In all, information from 2,750 participants was analyzed.

Number Crunching 

The study was unique in that it reached its conclusions via machine-learning techniques. In other words, they used computers to pick out patterns from a large collection of data. Given their findings, the authors contend that this same method could also be used to identify risk factors for stroke. 

Dr. David Kao, the report’s lead author and an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, Colorado, stated in a press release that “machine learning may be a useful addition to the way we look at data, and help us find new ways to lower the risk of heart failure and strokes.” 

It should be stressed that the study authors found an association between coffee consumption and stroke risk, rather than a “cause and effect” relationship. Because of this, they cannot conclusively link coffee drinking to a decrease risk of stroke.