Tea 'can help heart attack victims to live longer'

Heart attack victims could increase their chance of survival by drinking plenty of tea, doctors said today.

Heavy tea drinkers are the least likely to die in the years following a heart attack, according to a study of 1,900 American heart attack patients.

Even those who drink just two cups of tea per week have a lower death rate than those who do not indulge in a regular brew.

The study, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, found that those who drank the most tea before heart attacks - more than 14 cups a week - were 44 per cent less likely to die in the years afterwards, compared with non-tea drinkers.

Moderate drinkers, or those who had fewer than 14 cups, were 28 per cent less likely to die in the three to four years following their attack.

Kenneth Mukamal, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston interviewed and examined heart attack patients over nearly four years.

The patients - mainly in their sixties - were interviewed around four days after their heart attack and asked how much tea they consumed.

When the patients were contacted four years later, 313 had died - threequarters from cardiovascular disease.

There was little difference between patients in terms of education and income, and their exercise, smoking and drinking habits.

Mr Mukamal said the "dramatic" findings pointed towards a possible link between flavonoid intake and better-survival rates in people suffering from heart or blood vessel disease.

Flavonoids - found in tea - may help some patients avoid further heart attacks by preventing degeneration of the arterial wall, Mr Mukamal said.

"I have to say that the magnitude of the association we found between tea drinking and mortality and people who survive a heart attack was pretty dramatic, certainly more so than I think I would have expected. We found that tea drinkers generally had lower death rates regardless of age, gender, smoking status, obesity, hypertension, diabetes or previous heart attack."

Mr Mukamal cited an earlier study which showed that black tea improved the blood vessels' ability to relax.

Tea is a major source of flavonoids - antioxidants that occur naturally in plants and are also found in apples, onions, broccoli and red wine.

Flavonoids are believed to help to prevent the build-up of cholesterol and have an anti-clotting effect.

The study included 1,019 non-tea drinkers, 615 were moderate drinkers whose average weekly tea intake in the year before their heart attack was less than 14 cups and 266 heavy tea drinkers who drank more than 14 cups per week. The findings led researchers to conclude there was an "inverse relationship" between tea drinking and heart attack survival rates.

More than 165 million cups of tea are drunk in Britain every day - the equivalent of three cups per person.