Caffeinated coffee is a psychoactive substance, notes Sandra Sanchez-Roige, Ph.D., an associate professor in the University of California San Diego School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry. She is one of an international group of researchers that compared coffee-consumption characteristics from a 23andMe database with an even larger set of records in the United Kingdom. She is the corresponding author of a study recently published in the journalHayley H. A. Thorpe, Ph.D.
"The second is something that coffee lovers are really keen on learning," Sanchez-Roige said."Is drinking coffee good or bad? Is it associated with positive health outcomes or not?" "It's common to combine similar datasets in this field to increase study power. This information paints a fairly clear picture that combining these two datasets was really not a wise idea. And we didn't end up doing that," Thorpe said. She explained that melding the databases might mask effects, leading researchers toward incorrect conclusions -- or even cancelling each other out.
"Genetics influences lots of things. For instance, it influences how tall you might be," he said."And those kinds of things probably would play out very similarly, whether you lived in the U.S. or the U.K. But coffee is a decision that people make."