Caffeine and miscarriages: is there a relationship?

Can coffee (therefore caffeine) increase the chances of a miscarriage? The results of a study raise a red alarm flag.

Is drinking coffee good or bad for you?

It has always been a highly debated issue.

Many are led to think that a couple of cups a day do not hurt and even recently there has been talk of coffee as a drink that could be an integral part of a healthy lifestyle.

Despite this, warnings and exceptions are constantly increasing thanks to the studies that are done.

For example, people suffering from high blood pressure, diabetes or other particular health conditions must be very careful about caffeine consumption.

The study on coffee and spotaneous abortions

A study conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Ohio State University published in March 2016 in the authoritative scientific journal Fertility and Sterility found a worrying link between caffeine consumption and the possibility of a miscarriage.

The study recruited 501 couples looking for a child between 2005 and 2009. Both men and women were asked to record their daily use of cigarettes, caffeine-containing beverages, alcohol and multivitamins. This is both in the research phase of pregnancy and in the early stages of it.

The couple also had to use ovulation tests and pregnancy tests to confirm the pregnancy as soon as possible. The pregnancy tests also had to be used for several days to monitor the continuation of the pregnancy and any changes from positive to negative. Even these very early abortions were classified as abortions.

The data collected in the study would seem to show that couples who drank more than two caffeinated beverages a day during the weeks before conception had a higher risk of pregnancy terminating early.

We used the term couple specifically because the probability of abortion found in the study affects not only the caffeine taken by the woman but also that introduced by the man.

In fact, it has been seen that a man’s pre-conceptional consumption of caffeinated beverages is strongly associated with pregnancy loss in the same way as a woman.

Caffeine, males and miscarriages

Theories about how a man’s caffeine consumption can affect a woman’s pregnancy mainly concern sperm.

One of the largest studies, published in 2010 in the American Journal of Epidemiology and based on a sample of 2,554 young Danes, found that a high intake of Coke (or similar), defined as more than 14 pint bottles per week and/or high caffeine intake (more than 800 milligrams per day) were associated with both a reduced sperm concentration and an overall low number of sperm in the ejaculate. (A typical cup of drip coffee contains about 100 milligrams of caffeine)

The NIH study also corroborates previous research showing that women who drink more than two caffeinated drinks a day during the early stages of pregnancy — defined in this study as the first seven weeks — may be more likely to lose weight . Child. In the study, 98 of 344 singleton women lost their baby.

But the authors of the NIH study added that they don’t know for sure whether it was caffeine that caused the pregnancy loss. This is because research has shown that the couples who drank more caffeine during the preconception phase and lost their babies were also those who were also older (35 years or older). This could also mean that the health of the fetus may have been influenced by the age of the sperm and egg cells or by environmental exposures that accumulate over time and therefore be more influential in couples beyond a certain age.

The good news of the study is that women who took a daily multivitamin before and after conception had a much lower risk of miscarriage.