Coffee drinking timing and mortality in US adults

To identify the patterns of coffee drinking timing in the US population and evaluate their associations with all-cause and cause-specific mortality.

This study included 40 725 adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999–2018 who had complete information on dietary data and 1463 adults from the Women’s and Men’s Lifestyle Validation Study who had complete data on 7-day dietary record. Clustering analysis was used to identify patterns of coffee drinking timing.

In this observational study, two distinct patterns of coffee drinking timing [morning type (36% of participants) and all-day-type patterns (14% of participants)] were identified in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and were validated in the Women’s and Men’s Lifestyle Validation Study. During a median (interquartile range) follow-up of 9.8 (9.1) years, a total of 4295 all-cause deaths, 1268 cardiovascular disease deaths, and 934 cancer deaths were recorded. After adjustment for caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee intake amounts, sleep hours, and other confounders, the morning-type pattern, rather than the all-day-type pattern, was significantly associated with lower risks of all-cause (hazard ratio: .84; 95% confidential interval: .74–.95) and cardiovascular disease-specific (hazard ratio: .69; 95% confidential interval: .55–.87) mortality as compared with non-coffee drinking. Coffee drinking timing significantly modified the association between coffee intake amounts and all-cause mortality (P-interaction = .031); higher coffee intake amounts were significantly associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality in participants with morning-type pattern but not in those with all-day-type pattern.

Drinking coffee in the morning may be more strongly associated with a lower risk of mortality than drinking coffee later in the day.