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Comment by hereme888 | Hacker News Reader

Poor title. This is specific to patients who already underwent cardioversion (shocking the heart back into normal rhythm) AND were habitual coffee drinkers, who now have reduced coffee to 1 cup/day rather than sudden complete abstinence. Recurrence at 6 months was 47% instead of 64%. And this only applies to those who don't have clear caffeine-associated episodes.

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To add more information, the intervention was guidance about caffeine intake. From the Methods:

> If allocated to caffeinated coffee consumption, patients were encouraged to drink at least 1 cup of caffeinated coffee (or at least 1 espresso shot) and other caffeine-containing products every day as per their usual lifestyle. It was recommended that patients in the coffee consumption group not intentionally increase or decrease consumption of coffee or other caffeine-containing products.

> If allocated to the abstinence group, patients were encouraged to completely abstain from coffee, including decaffeinated coffee, and other caffeine containing products.

> including decaffeinated coffee

Sounds like the cause could also be some other substance than caffeine? Decaf still contains various other alkaloids.

The people who were selected into the study were not necessarily "habitual coffee drinkers". The only requirement was "was a habitual coffee drinker sometime in the past five years". The difference between the two is subtle, but its possible there were people in the study who had already abstained for some amount of time.

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