Coffee Drinkers Show Sharply Lower Risk of Liver Disease, Major UK Study Finds
A 13-year tracking study of nearly 355,000 adults found that five or more cups a day cut cirrhosis risk by a third and liver cancer risk by almost half — and decaf worked almost as well as the real thing.
By Source Reporters Newsdesk
Sat, 25 July 2026 · 3 min read
Drinking coffee, in almost any form, is linked to a substantially lower risk of serious liver disease, according to a large long-term study published in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
Researchers followed 354,957 participants in the UK Biobank who had no signs of cirrhosis or liver cancer when they enrolled, tracking their health outcomes over a median of 13 years. None of the coffee-drinking habits recorded at the outset were experimental interventions — the study simply compared people who drank different amounts of coffee day to day.
The results were striking. Compared with people who drank no coffee at all, those who consumed five or more cups a day had a 32 percent lower risk of developing cirrhosis, a 47 percent lower risk of liver cancer, and a 42 percent lower risk of dying from liver-related causes. The protective effect scaled with intake: each additional cup was associated with progressively lower risk, a pattern researchers describe as a dose-response relationship — one of the stronger forms of evidence available outside a controlled clinical trial.
Perhaps the most surprising finding was that decaffeinated coffee conferred almost identical protection to fully caffeinated coffee. That undercuts the long-standing assumption that caffeine itself is doing the protective work, and points instead to other compounds in the bean — polyphenols, diterpenes and other bioactive substances that survive the decaffeination process.
To understand what was happening physiologically, the research team also examined liver MRI scans and blood protein profiles from a subset of participants. Coffee drinkers showed measurably lower levels of liver fat, iron accumulation, fibrosis and inflammation than non-drinkers. Their blood carried higher levels of proteins associated with healthy liver function and lower levels of the proteins that mark scarring and chronic inflammation — biological evidence that lines up with the reduced disease rates.
Liver disease has been rising globally, driven substantially by metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), the fatty liver condition linked to obesity and type 2 diabetes, as well as by alcohol-related liver disease. Cirrhosis and liver cancer are typically diagnosed late, when treatment options narrow sharply, which is part of why researchers are so interested in inexpensive, widely available interventions that might shift population-level risk before disease takes hold.
Hepatologists not involved in the study cautioned that observational data of this kind cannot prove that coffee itself causes the reduced risk — people who drink a lot of coffee may differ from non-drinkers in other ways that also affect liver health, such as diet, activity levels or alcohol consumption, even after statistical adjustment. Still, the size of the cohort, the length of follow-up, and the consistency of the dose-response pattern make this one of the more robust pieces of evidence yet assembled on the coffee-liver relationship, adding to a body of earlier research that had already linked coffee to lower rates of liver enzyme abnormalities.
For now, researchers are not recommending people take up coffee purely for liver protection, particularly those sensitive to caffeine or with other health conditions where high coffee intake is discouraged. But for the roughly two billion cups already consumed worldwide each day, the findings offer reassurance — and for public health researchers, a relatively cheap, non-pharmaceutical lever worth investigating further as liver disease rates continue to climb.