ABSTRACT

Objective:
To investigate associations between coffee and tea consumption with accelerated ageing indexed by retinal age gap.

Methods:
The average daily coffee and tea consumption over the past year was obtained using a touchscreen questionnaire. The retinal age gap, the difference between the predicted retinal age and the chronological age, was used as the indicator of accelerated ageing. Linear regression models were applied to examine the associations of coffee and tea consumption with retinal age gap. Restricted cubic spline (RCS) model was utilized to explore potential non-linear associations between coffee and tea consumption (cups/day) with retinal age gaps.

Results:
This study included 35,740 participants with a mean age of 56.8 ± 8.03 years, including 19,902 (55.7%) males. Among the participants, 7693 (21.5%) were non-coffee drinkers, and 5164 (14.4%) were non-tea drinkers. After adjusting for demographic covariates, multilinear models found that coffee consumption was not associated with retinal age gaps. However, after these adjustments, tea consumption was associated with a smaller retinal age gap (β = -0.03, 95% CI = -0.04~-0.01, p = 0.006), particularly in those who consumed > 4 cups of tea per day (β = -0.22,95% CI = -0.36~-0.08, p = 0.003). No non-linear regressions between coffee or tea with retinal age gaps were observed in RCS models (P non-linear = 0.329 for coffee, P non-linear = 0.273 for tea; respectively).

Conclusions:
Our study identified a significant inverse association between tea consumption and the retinal age gap. This finding suggests that tea intake is a dietary factor linked to biological aging process indexed by retinal age gaps.

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