Habitual Coffee Drinking and the Genome

Do you drink coffee? Tea? How much caffeine you consume may be linked  to  certain genes that determine an individuals caffeine tolerance as well as their withdrawal symptoms. Past studies done on European and African populations have found that the presence of certain SNPs in the genome were correlated with individuals who consume more coffee. Recently, a genome wide associated study on a Japanese population was done to further test this hypothesis and their results also concluded that there is a correlation between the two. Interestingly, the locus that is associated with coffee consumption found in the Japanese study has SNPs that are only found in East Asian populations (as opposed to European and African populations). Although future studies need to be done in order to discover the functional relevance of the SNPs found and coffee consumption, it is still fascinating that how much caffeine an individual drinks may be related to specific genes!

To read the article based on the Japanese study published in Nature see here and see here here for the original study done with the European population.

Sam Lubrano