New trial finds patients with irregular heart rhythms can have coffee without harm

ABC NEWS (Australia)

It's long been believed that caffeine exacerbates irregular heart rhythms. But a new trial has found patients with atrial fibrillation can have a cup of coffee without doing harm. Meanwhile, new antibiotics studies uncover the effects of antibiotics on vaccines and schizophrenia. Dr Normal Swan explains.

Transcript

00:00this fascinating trial in South Australia where they tested this proposition and it's quite a

00:07difficult trial to do because you actually had to ask your control group to abstain from coffee or

00:13decaffeinated coffee or caffeine containing products whilst the other group took coffee

00:18about a cup a day and the condition that they have was a common abnormal rhythm of the heart

00:24called atrial fibrillation and this can affect people from kind of middle age on and it's a

00:30serious arrhythmia because it's where the top two chambers of the heart quiver and don't transmit

00:35information to the bottom two chambers and the heart runs very fast and irregularly and you can

00:40get blood clots forming on the left side of the heart which then spin can spin off to the brain

00:45causing a stroke so it's not a trivial arrhythmia to have and people were wondering whether coffee

00:51made atrial fibrillation worse because they can get rid of atrial fibrillation but it tends to come

00:55back and this this was a study of recurrence of atrial fibrillation so one group had coffee and

01:02one group did not have coffee and did not have any caffeine in their lives and they monitored them

01:07and the group with coffee had fewer recurrences of atrial fibrillation than the people not on coffee

01:14very interesting do we know why there is evidence in other areas that coffee is not necessarily bad

01:20for your heart that coffee drinkers assuming that they're not smokers at the same time because

01:24that's the confusing thing with coffee is in the you know used to be that coffee drinkers were smokers

01:29too and that's not necessarily true anymore is that there are fewer rates of fewer instances of heart

01:34attacks and strokes on people who are taking coffee so coffee is not necessarily bad for the heart

01:39what is known to be bad for the heart in terms of atrial fibrillation is alcohol and that's also an

01:44Australian study which showed drinking alcohol can make a recurrence of atrial fibrillation worse

01:51so coffee okay alcohol not I've got two antibiotic stories I want to ask you about today the first

01:58one there's seems to be now a correlation suggested between antibiotics and vaccines being less effective

02:06what do we know about this about this research so this is a study so there's been other studies in

02:12this area but this is a study of babies and antibiotic exposure so not antibiotic exposure in pregnancy

02:19antibiotic exposure after pregnancy it's not that common for babies to be given antibiotics in the

02:25first few months of life but it does happen and what they showed was that the antibody response

02:33not to all vaccines but to some vaccines haemophilus influenzae and diphtheria being two of them

02:39was lower in babies who'd had antibiotics there's also some evidence in adults which is a different

02:47study of influenza vaccine where antibiotics didn't influence the antibody response to

02:54influenza vaccine if you'd had influenza vaccine before but if it was your first influenza vaccine

03:00it did seem to have an effect and what seems to be going on here is the microbiome is that when you

03:08take antibiotics the bugs in your bowel change and the microbiome trains your immune system and

03:16there's something happening here maybe in relation to a bacterium in the bowel called bifidobacterium

03:22which trains your immune system because what happens when you take a vaccine is particularly a vaccine

03:29against a respiratory infection is that it trains the immune system on the surface lining of our bodies

03:35particularly the respiratory tract and also our bowels and so what the microbiome does is that it

03:41trains this surface immunity as well as a general immunity and there's something going on here so

03:47it's just another example of how profoundly antibiotics can change that but if you're going to be giving

03:51antibiotics to a young baby you usually need to give them because the baby's at high risk it just might

03:58mean that you might want to top up we don't know enough yet but top up certain vaccines a little

04:04bit later to make sure they've got enough antibodies on board meanwhile there's a scottish study now

04:10suggesting that a common antibiotic could prevent schizophrenia this is a fascinating study it was done

04:16out of the university of edinburgh but in fact it used data from finland where they've got very good

04:21um they've got very good follow-up and data on um on all sorts of things to do with health and what

04:28it's known that if you attend as a young adolescent uh a psychiatric clinic the sort of conditions that you

04:36would be presenting with do put you at higher risk of schizophrenia later in life uh later in adolescence

04:43and early adulthood so they took this group of high-risk children and watched them through and found

04:49that if the kids had been on an antibiotic that's used for acne called doxycycline they were at

04:56significantly lower risk of developing schizophrenia later on in in their lives so this is this really

05:04interesting effect which is almost certainly well it could be a microbiome effect because the microbiome

05:10does influence the brain that produces chemicals which influence the brain and dampens down inflammation

05:15but the the family of antibiotics that doxycycline belongs to are known to have other effects on the

05:21body other than the antibiotic effect so this could be if it's proven in bigger studies to it's very hard

05:28to do a trial because you're going to find these children you're going to have to wait for years

05:34but it may be when they confirm with other studies that have similar data points that if you've got a

05:39child at higher risk than average of schizophrenia a course of this antibiotic pretty harmless to do

05:47might reduce the risk of schizophrenia later on

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