Moderate coffee and caffeine consumption is associated with lower risk of developing multiple cardiometabolic diseases, new study finds

Consuming moderate amounts of coffee and caffeine regularly may offer a protective effect against developing multiple cardiometabolic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke, according to new research published in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Researchers found that regular coffee or caffeine intake, especially at moderate levels, was associated with a lower risk of new-onset cardiometabolic multimorbidity (CM), which refers to the coexistence of at least two cardiometabolic diseases.

The prevalence of individuals with multiple cardiometabolic diseases, or CM, is becoming an increasing public health concern as populations age around the world, notes the study.

Coffee and caffeine consumption could play an important protective role in almost all phases of CM development, researchers found.

“Consuming three cups of coffee, or 200-300 mg caffeine, per day might help to reduce the risk of developing cardiometabolic multimorbidity in individuals without any cardiometabolic disease,” said the study’s lead author Chaofu Ke, M.D., Ph.D., of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health at Suzhou Medical College of Soochow University, in Suzhou, China.

The study found that compared with non-consumers or consumers of less than 100mg caffeine per day, consumers of moderate amount of coffee (3 drinks per day) or caffeine (200-300 mg per day) had a 48.1% or 40.7% reduced risk for new-onset CM.

Ke and his colleagues based their findings on data from the UK Biobank, a large and detailed longitudinal dietary study with over 500,000 participants aged 37-73 years. The study excluded individuals who had ambiguous information on caffeine intake. The resulting pool of participants included a total of 172,315 individuals who were free of any cardiometabolic diseases at baseline for the analyses of caffeine, and a corresponding 188,091 individuals for the analyses of coffee and tea consumption.

The participants’ cardiometabolic diseases outcomes were identified from self-reported medical conditions, primary care data, linked inpatient hospital data and death registry records linked to the UK Biobank.

Coffee and caffeine intake at all levels were inversely associated with the risk of new-onset CM in participants without cardiometabolic diseases. Those who reported moderate coffee or caffeine intake had the lowest risk, the study found. Moderate coffee or caffeine intake was inversely associated with almost all developmental stages of CM.

“The findings highlight that promoting moderate amounts of coffee or caffeine intake as a dietary habit to healthy people might have far-reaching benefits for the prevention of CM,” Ke said.

Addressing a Research Gap

Numerous epidemiological studies have revealed the protective effects of coffee, tea and caffeine consumption on morbidity of single cardiometabolic diseases. However, the potential effects of these beverages on the development of CM were largely unknown.

The authors reviewed the available research on this topic and found people with single cardiometabolic disease may have a two-fold higher all-cause mortality risk than those free of any cardiometabolic diseases. By contrast, the researchers found individuals with CM may have an almost 4 to 7 times higher risk of all-cause mortality. The researchers also noted that CM may present higher risks of loss of physical function and mental stress than those with single diseases.

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A recipe for zero-emissions fuel: Soda cans, seawater, and caffeine

A sustainable source for clean energy may lie in old soda cans and seawater.

MIT engineers have found that when the aluminum in soda cans is exposed in its pure form and mixed with seawater, the solution bubbles up and naturally produces hydrogen -- a gas that can be subsequently used to power an engine or fuel cell without generating carbon emissions. What's more, this simple reaction can be sped up by adding a common stimulant: caffeine.

In a study appearing today in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, the researchers show they can produce hydrogen gas by dropping pretreated, pebble-sized aluminum pellets into a beaker of filtered seawater. The aluminum is pretreated with a rare-metal alloy that effectively scrubs aluminum into a pure form that can react with seawater to generate hydrogen. The salt ions in the seawater can in turn attract and recover the alloy, which can be reused to generate more hydrogen, in a sustainable cycle.

The team found that this reaction between aluminum and seawater successfully produces hydrogen gas, though slowly. On a lark, they tossed into the mix some coffee grounds and found, to their surprise, that the reaction picked up its pace.

In the end, the team discovered that a low concentration of imidazole -- an active ingredient in caffeine -- is enough to significantly speed up the reaction, producing the same amount of hydrogen in just five minutes, compared to two hours without the added stimulant.

The researchers are developing a small reactor that could run on a marine vessel or underwater vehicle. The vessel would hold a supply of aluminum pellets (recycled from old soda cans and other aluminum products), along with a small amount of gallium-indium and caffeine. These ingredients could be periodically funneled into the reactor, along with some of the surrounding seawater, to produce hydrogen on demand. The hydrogen could then fuel an onboard engine to drive a motor or generate electricity to power the ship.

"This is very interesting for maritime applications like boats or underwater vehicles because you wouldn't have to carry around seawater -- it's readily available," says study lead author Aly Kombargi, a PhD student in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering. "We also don't have to carry a tank of hydrogen. Instead, we would transport aluminum as the 'fuel,' and just add water to produce the hydrogen that we need."

The study's co-authors include Enoch Ellis, an undergraduate in chemical engineering; Peter Godart PhD '21, who has founded a company to recycle aluminum as a source of hydrogen fuel; and Douglas Hart, MIT professor of mechanical engineering.

Shields up

The MIT team, led by Hart, is developing efficient and sustainable methods to produce hydrogen gas, which is seen as a "green" energy source that could power engines and fuel cells without generating climate-warming emissions.

One drawback to fueling vehicles with hydrogen is that some designs would require the gas to be carried onboard like traditional gasoline in a tank -- a risky setup, given hydrogen's volatile potential. Hart and his team have instead looked for ways to power vehicles with hydrogen without having to constantly transport the gas itself.

They found a possible workaround in aluminum -- a naturally abundant and stable material that, when in contact with water, undergoes a straightforward chemical reaction that generates hydrogen and heat.

The reaction, however, comes with a sort of Catch-22: While aluminum can generate hydrogen when it mixes with water, it can only do so in a pure, exposed state. The instant aluminum meets with oxygen, such as in air, the surface immediately forms a thin, shield-like layer of oxide that prevents further reactions. This barrier is the reason hydrogen doesn't immediately bubble up when you drop a soda can in water.

In previous work, using fresh water, the team found they could pierce aluminum's shield and keep the reaction with water going by pretreating the aluminum with a small amount of rare metal alloy made from a specific concentration of gallium and indium. The alloy serves as an "activator," scrubbing away any oxide buildup and creating a pure aluminum surface that is free to react with water. When they ran the reaction in fresh, de-ionized water, they found that one pretreated pellet of aluminum produced 400 milliliters of hydrogen in just five minutes. They estimate that just 1 gram of pellets would generate 1.3 liters of hydrogen in the same amount of time.

But to further scale up the system would require a significant supply of gallium indium, which is relatively expensive and rare.

"For this idea to be cost-effective and sustainable, we had to work on recovering this alloy postreaction," Kombargi says.

By the sea

In the team's new work, they found they could retrieve and reuse gallium indium using a solution of ions. The ions -- atoms or molecules with an electrical charge -- protect the metal alloy from reacting with water and help it to precipitate into a form that can be scooped out and reused.

"Lucky for us, seawater is an ionic solution that is very cheap and available," says Kombargi, who tested the idea with seawater from a nearby beach. "I literally went to Revere Beach with a friend and we grabbed our bottles and filled them, and then I just filtered out algae and sand, added aluminum to it, and it worked with the same consistent results."

He found that hydrogen indeed bubbled up when he added aluminum to a beaker of filtered seawater. And he was able to scoop out the gallium indium afterward. But the reaction happened much more slowly than it did in fresh water. It turns out that the ions in seawater act to shield gallium indium, such that it can coalesce and be recovered after the reaction. But the ions have a similar effect on aluminum, building up a barrier that slows its reaction with water.

As they looked for ways to speed up the reaction in seawater, the researchers tried out various and unconventional ingredients.

"We were just playing around with things in the kitchen, and found that when we added coffee grounds into seawater and dropped aluminum pellets in, the reaction was quite fast compared to just seawater," Kombargi says.

To see what might explain the speedup, the team reached out to colleagues in MIT's chemistry department, who suggested they try imidazole -- an active ingredient in caffeine, which happens to have a molecular structure that can pierce through aluminum (allowing the material to continue reacting with water), while leaving gallium indium's ionic shield intact.

"That was our big win," Kombargi says. "We had everything we wanted: recovering the gallium indium, plus the fast and efficient reaction."

The researchers believe they have the essential ingredients to run a sustainable hydrogen reactor. They plan to test it first in marine and underwater vehicles. They've calculated that such a reactor, holding about 40 pounds of aluminum pellets, could power a small underwater glider for about 30 days by pumping in surrounding seawater and generating hydrogen to power a motor.

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Impact of coral chemical compounds on reef composition and health

Stumbling upon a new source of underwater caffeine was just an added bonus of a new study examining the impact of chemical compounds that corals release into the seawater.

The study found that the organic chemical compounds produced through metabolism -- known as metabolites or exudates -- vary significantly by coral species and that the compounds impact the abundances and compositions of reef microorganisms differently.

This differential release of metabolites from benthic reef organisms is particularly significant in the Caribbean where coral dominance is shifting from hard stony corals to soft octocorals in response to human-caused stressors such as eutrophication, overfishing, and global climate change.

The study "demonstrates the importance of benthic exudates for structuring microbial communities on oligotrophic reefs by focusing on the exudates released from abundant stony corals, octocorals, and an invasive alga," according to the paper led by authors from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), "Benthic exometabolites and their ecological significance on threatened Caribbean coral reefs," published in ISME Communications.

"We wanted to know what are the molecules that coral organisms release into the environment, and how do those molecules impact the reef microbes in the seawater surrounding the corals," said lead author Laura Weber, a former postdoc and current information systems associate in WHOI's Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry Department.

"As the species composition of these reefs shifts, it is likely changing the chemicals that are released on the reef that then will have impacts on the microbial community," Weber said. "We need to pay more attention to how changes in reef structure and species composition might influence the microbes that live on the reef, leading to more feedbacks in terms of reef health." She said that understanding microbes on reefs, how they are functioning, and how they might be contributing to the health of corals and of reefs themselves is "pretty much an untapped area to explore."

Here's the caffeine connection.

For the study, researchers collected exudates from six species of Caribbean benthic organisms in a lab setting, using organisms obtained from within the Virgin Islands National Park, including stony corals, octocorals, and an invasive encrusting alga called Ramicrusta textilis. The researchers surprisingly found that R. textilis released caffeine in high quantities.

Their results further "demonstrate that exudates from benthic organisms contribute to the complex pool of extracellular metabolites in reef seawater and that exudate composition varies significantly by species," according to the study

As to why R. textilis produces caffeine, the study notes that caffeine production has not been widely investigated for marine organisms, but that it is a common metabolite produced by land plants generally to deter herbivores and pathogenic microbes. These characteristics "could contribute to the ability of R. textilis to invade and flourish on Caribbean reefs," according to the report. "Given the growing prevalence of Ramicrusta on diverse Caribbean reefs, follow-up research examining the ecological significance of its metabolites on microbes and other reef organisms is needed."

This study "is an important step forward in identifying chemical signals that can help scientists assess reef health," said Elizabeth Kujawinski, co-author of the paper. "Similar to human health diagnostics, the chemical signals within a reef ecosystem are intimately linked to the functions of the symbiotic relationships within reefs." Kujawinski is a senior scientist in WHOI's Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry Department and director of the Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet (C-CoMP), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center that is based at WHOI.

Co-author Amy Apprill, associate scientist in WHOI's Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry Department, said an important implication of the research is that a diverse benthic community helps to contribute to a more varied metabolite pool and likely supports a more diverse microbial community.

"We are trying to build kind of a library of what microbes and metabolites are present on reefs. My dream is to be able to go out to a reef, take a bucket of reef water, screen it for microbes and metabolites, and be able to tell something about the health of that ecosystem," Apprill said. "This is so important to do because the current methods to monitor reefs are highly visual-based, and it can take months or years to determine if coral is sick or growing. Metabolites and microbes have the potential to be really sensitive sensors for reef health."

This research was conducted with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation.

Key Takeaways

Chemical compounds produced through metabolism and then released -- known as metabolites or exudates -- vary significantly by coral species and impact the abundances and compositions of reef microorganisms differently.

The differential release of metabolites from benthic reef organisms is particularly significant in the Caribbean where coral dominance is shifting from hard stony corals to soft octocorals in response to human-caused stressors such as eutrophication, overfishing, and global climate change.

"As the species composition of these reefs shifts, it is likely changing the chemicals that are released on the reef that then will have impacts on the microbial community. We need to pay more attention to how changes in reef structure and species composition might influence the microbes that live on the reef, leading to more feedbacks in terms of reef health."

Stumbling on a new source of underwater caffeine was just an added bonus of a new study examining the impact of chemical compounds that corals release into the seawater.

This study "is an important step forward in identifying chemical signals that can help scientists assess reef health. Similar to human health diagnostics, the chemical signals within a reef ecosystem are intimately linked to the functions of the symbiotic relationships within reefs."

Read more at Science Daily

Coffee time: Caffeine improves reaction to moving targets

In the first study of its kind to explore caffeine's effects on dynamic visual skills, researchers concluded that caffeine increases alertness and detection accuracy for moving targets. Caffeine also improved participants' reaction times.

"A lot of what happens in our environment is moving -- like trying to cross a busy intersection as a pedestrian or finding something on a shelf as you're walking through the aisles of a grocery store," said Dr. Kristine Dalton of Waterloo's School of Optometry & Vision Science. "Testing visual acuity under dynamic conditions can provide more information about our functional performance in these scenarios than traditional static visual acuity measurements alone."

Visual acuity, also known as clarity of vision or sharpness of vision, refers to a person's ability to detect and recognize small details and can be measured under static (stationary) or dynamic (moving) conditions. While both static and dynamic visual acuity provide important information about how we interact with the world around us, dynamic visual acuity skills are especially important in the many daily activities in which we, or objects around us are moving.

"While we already know that caffeine increases the velocity of rapid-eye movements, we wanted to further investigate how exactly caffeine enhances visual processing and facilitates the detection of moving visual stimuli by testing dynamic visual acuity," said co-author Beatríz Redondo of the University of Granada's Department of Optics.

On two separate days, half of the study's participants ingested a caffeine capsule (4mg/kg) while the other half ingested a placebo capsule. Using a computer-based test designed and validated at the University of Waterloo, each participant's dynamic visual acuity skills were measured before and 60 minutes after caffeine ingestion.

Researchers found that participants who had ingested the caffeine capsules showed significantly greater accuracy and faster speed when identifying smaller moving stimuli, inferring caffeine positively influences participants' stimulus processing and decision-making. Eye movement velocity and contrast sensitivity, which are implicated in dynamic visual acuity performance, were also sensitive to caffeine intake.

"Our findings show that caffeine consumption can actually be helpful for a person's visual function by enhancing alertness and feelings of wakefulness," Dalton said. "This is especially true for those critical, everyday tasks, like driving, riding a bike or playing sports, that require us to attend to detailed information in moving objects when making decisions."

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Only alcohol -- not caffeine, diet or lack of sleep -- might trigger heart rhythm condition

New research from UC San Francisco that tested possible triggers of a common heart condition, including caffeine, sleep deprivation and sleeping on the left side, found that only alcohol use was consistently associated with more episodes of the heart arrhythmia.

The authors conclude that people might be able to reduce their risk of atrial fibrillation (AF) by avoiding certain triggers.

The study is published in JAMA Cardiology and was presented November 14, 2021, at the annual Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association.

Researchers were surprised to find that although most of the things that participants thought would be related to their AF were not, those in the intervention group still experienced less arrhythmia than the people in a comparison group that was not self-monitoring.

"This suggests that those personalized assessments revealed actionable results," said lead author Gregory Marcus, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at UCSF. "Although caffeine was the most commonly selected trigger for testing, we found no evidence of a near-term relationship between caffeine consumption and atrial fibrillation. In contrast, alcohol consumption most consistently exhibited heightened risks of atrial fibrillation."

Atrial fibrillation contributes to more than 150,000 deaths in the United States each year, reports the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with the death rate on the rise for more than 20 years.

To learn more about what patients felt was especially important to study about the disease, researchers held a brainstorming session in 2014. Patients said researching individual triggers for AF was their top priority, giving rise to the I-STOP-AFib study, which enabled individuals to test any presumed AF trigger. About 450 people participated, more than half of whom (58 percent) were men, and the overwhelming majority of whom were white (92 percent).

Participants in the randomized clinical trial utilized a mobile electrocardiogram recording device along with a phone app to log potential triggers like drinking alcohol and caffeine, sleeping on the left side or not getting enough sleep, eating a large meal, a cold drink, or sticking to a particular diet, engaging in exercise, or anything else they thought was relevant to their AF. Although participants were most likely to select caffeine as a trigger, there was no association with AF. Recent research from UCSF has similarly failed to demonstrate a relationship between caffeine and arrhythmias -- on the contrary, investigators found it may have a protective effect.

The new study demonstrated that consumption of alcohol was the only trigger that consistently resulted in significantly more self-reported AF episodes.

The individualized testing method, known as n-of-1, did not validate participant-selected triggers for AF. But trial participants did report fewer AF episodes than those in the control group, and the data suggest that behaviors like avoiding alcohol could lessen the chances of having an AF episode.

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Don't count on caffeine to fight sleep deprivation

Rough night of sleep? Relying on caffeine to get you through the day isn't always the answer, says a new study from Michigan State University.

Researchers from MSU's Sleep and Learning Lab, led by psychology associate professor Kimberly Fenn, assessed how effective caffeine was in counteracting the negative effects of sleep deprivation on cognition. As it turns out, caffeine can only get you so far.

The study -- published in the most recent edition of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition -- assessed the impact of caffeine after a night of sleep deprivation. More than 275 participants were asked to complete a simple attention task as well as a more challenging "placekeeping" task that required completion of tasks in a specific order without skipping or repeating steps.

Fenn's study is the first to investigate the effect of caffeine on placekeeping after a period of sleep deprivation.

"We found that sleep deprivation impaired performance on both types of tasks and that having caffeine helped people successfully achieve the easier task. However, it had little effect on performance on the placekeeping task for most participants," Fenn said.

She added: "Caffeine may improve the ability to stay awake and attend to a task, but it doesn't do much to prevent the sort of procedural errors that can cause things like medical mistakes and car accidents."

Insufficient sleep is pervasive in the United States, a problem that has intensified during the pandemic, Fenn said. Consistently lacking adequate sleep not only affects cognition and alters mood, but can eventually take a toll on immunity.

"Caffeine increases energy, reduces sleepiness and can even improve mood, but it absolutely does not replace a full night of sleep, Fenn said. "Although people may feel as if they can combat sleep deprivation with caffeine, their performance on higher-level tasks will likely still be impaired. This is one of the reasons why sleep deprivation can be so dangerous."

Fenn said that the study has the potential to inform both theory and practice.

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Brain changed by caffeine in utero

 New research finds caffeine consumed during pregnancy can change important brain pathways that could lead to behavioral problems later in life. Researchers in the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) analyzed thousands of brain scans of nine and ten-year-olds, and revealed changes in the brain structure in children who were exposed to caffeine in utero.

"These are sort of small effects and it's not causing horrendous psychiatric conditions, but it is causing minimal but noticeable behavioral issues that should make us consider long term effects of caffeine intake during pregnancy," said John Foxe, Ph.D., director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, and principal investigator of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development or ABCD Study at the University of Rochester. "I suppose the outcome of this study will be a recommendation that any caffeine during pregnancy is probably not such a good idea."

Elevated behavioral issues, attention difficulties, and hyperactivity are all symptoms that researchers observed in these children. "What makes this unique is that we have a biological pathway that looks different when you consume caffeine through pregnancy," said Zachary Christensen, a M.D/Ph.D. candidate in the Medical Science Training Program and first author on the paper published in the journal Neuropharmacology. "Previous studies have shown that children perform differently on IQ tests, or they have different psychopathology, but that could also be related to demographics, so it's hard to parse that out until you have something like a biomarker. This gives us a place to start future research to try to learn exactly when the change is occurring in the brain."

Investigators analyzed brain scans of more than 9,000 nine and ten-year-old participants in the ABCD study. They found clear changes in how the white matter tracks -- which form connections between brain regions -- were organized in children whose mothers reported they consumed caffeine during pregnancy.

URMC is one of 21-sites across the country collecting data for the ABCD study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health. The study is funded by the National Institutes of Health. Ed Freedman, Ph.D., is the principal investigator of the ABCD study in Rochester and a co-author of the study.

"It is important to point out this is a retrospective study," said Foxe. "We are relying on mothers to remember how much caffeine they took in while they were pregnant."

Previous studies have found caffeine can have a negative effect on pregnancy. It is also known that a fetus does not have the enzyme necessary to breakdown caffeine when it crosses the placenta. This new study reveals that caffeine could also leave a lasting impact on neurodevelopment.

The researchers point out that it is unclear if the impact of the caffeine on the fetal brain varies from one trimester to the next, or when during gestation these structural changes occur.

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Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates

Caffeine increases the ability to focus and problem solve, but a new study by a University of Arkansas researcher indicates it doesn't stimulate creativity.

"In Western cultures, caffeine is stereotypically associated with creative occupations and lifestyles, from writers and their coffee to programmers and their energy drinks, and there's more than a kernel of truth to these stereotypes," wrote Darya Zabelina, assistant professor of psychology and first author of the study recently published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

While the cognitive benefits of caffeine -- increased alertness, improved vigilance, enhanced focus and improved motor performance -- are well established, she said, the stimulant's affect on creativity is less known.

In the paper, Zabelina differentiates "convergent" from "divergent" thinking. The former is defined as seeking a specific solution to a problem, for example, the "correct" answer. The latter is characterized by idea generation where a large set of apt, novel or interesting responses would be suitable. Caffeine was shown to improve convergent thinking in the study, while consuming it had no significant impact on divergent thinking.

For the study, 80 volunteers were randomly given either a 200mg caffeine pill, equivalent to one strong cup of coffee, or a placebo. They were then tested on standard measures of convergent and divergent thinking, working memory and mood. In addition to the results on creativity, caffeine did not significantly affect working memory, but test subjects who took it did report feeling less sad.

"The 200mg enhanced problem solving significantly, but had no effect on creative thinking," said Zabelina. "It also didn't make it worse, so keep drinking your coffee; it won't interfere with these abilities."

From Science Daily

We love coffee, tea, chocolate and soft drinks so much, caffeine is literally in our blood

Scientists at Oregon State University may have proven how much people love coffee, tea, chocolate, soda and energy drinks as they validated their new method for studying how different drugs interact in the body.

In conducting mass spectrometry research, Richard van Breemen and Luying Chen worked with various biomedical suppliers to purchase 18 batches of supposedly pure human blood serum pooled from multiple donors. Biomedical suppliers get their blood from blood banks, who pass along inventory that's nearing its expiration date.

All 18 batches tested positive for caffeine. Also, in many of the samples the researchers found traces of cough medicine and an anti-anxiety drug. The findings point to the potential for contaminated blood transfusions, and also suggest that blood used in research isn't necessarily pure.

"From a 'contamination' standpoint, caffeine is not a big worry for patients, though it may be a commentary on current society," said Chen, a Ph.D. student. "But the other drugs being in there could be an issue for patients, as well as posing a problem for those of us doing this type of research because it's hard to get clean blood samples."

The study was published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis.

In addition to caffeine, the research also involved testing pooled serum for alprazolam, an anti-anxiety medicine sold under the trade name Xanax; dextromethorphan, an over-the-counter cough suppressant; and tolbutamide, a medicine used to treat type 2 diabetes.

All of the pooled serum was free of tolbutamide, but eight samples contained dextromethorphan and 13 contained alprazolam -- possibly meaning that if you ever need a blood transfusion, your odds of also receiving caffeine, cough medicine and an anti-anxiety drug are pretty good.

"The study leads you in that direction, though without doing a comprehensive survey of vendors and blood banks we can only speculate on how widespread the problem is," said van Breemen, the director of OSU's Linus Pauling Institute. "Another thing to consider is that we found drugs that we just happened to be looking for in doing the drug interaction assay validation -- how many others are in there too that we weren't looking for?"

The purpose of the study by Chen and van Breemen was to test a new method for evaluating the potential for interactions between botanical dietary supplements and drug metabolism.

The method involves rapid protein precipitation and ultra high pressure liquid chromatography and is being used to support clinical studies. In the clinical studies, participants take a drug cocktail along with a botanical supplement -- hops, licorice or red clover -- to see if the supplement causes any of the drugs to be metabolized differently than they otherwise would.

"Botanicals basically contain natural products with drug-like activities," van Breemen said. "Just as a drug may alter the drug-metabolizing enzymes, so can natural products. It can become a real problem when someone takes a botanical supplement and is also on prescription drugs -- how do those two interact? It's not straightforward or necessarily predictable, thus the need for methods to look for these interactions. The odd thing in this case was finding all the tainted blood."

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