Caffeine Effect to Congestive Heart Failure

Indonesia is a  big market for artificial energy drinks.  Sometimes I also drank one.  It is kind of supplement that can give you additional endurance to exercise your body or keeping you awake and feel more power for a while.  The reason why i drink it anyway in my condition, is quite frivolous.  I fall in love with the Taurine content.  Taurine is good for fat metabolism.  It can lower the blood sugar level, prevent the muscle fatigue, and even help fixing lever damage due to alcohol consumption in certain level.  Other than Taurine, Aspartame is another good ingredient for my diabetes as an artificial sweetener approved by FDA and WHO, that I can find in the powder energy drink.  Anyway, I forgot one bad thing, the caffeine. 

More endurance is not all good in CHF condition

What is caffeine ?

Caffeine is a bitter crystal form of  Xanthine alkaloid.  Due its function as a stimulant, some producers disguise the name with its original chemical/molecule name: 1,3,7- Trimethylxanthine.  It seems to appear safe to consume 50 mg of caffeine from each sachet of energy drink as I usually did.  The producers have also mentioned that people with hypertension, phenylketonuria, high level of phenylalanine, children and breastfeeding mothers, are not supposed to drink it.  Somehow they don't mentioned about its effect to Congestive Heart Failure or Dilated Cardiomyopathy patients.

Caffeine is usually found in beverages such as: coffee, tea, kola nut soft drinks, and energy drinks. Hundreds of million coffee, tea, and soft drinks drinkers are world widely spread nowadays. Above 90% of adults in America drink coffee or tea everyday, some have become caffeine addicts.  Caffeine will be toxic for a dose more than 1000 mg to a normal adults, whereas the typical daily dose used in daily life is around 500 mg at maximum. That is why FDA still marking it as a safe substance.

Good things and Bad things of Caffeine

There are good effects in consuming caffeine in adequate dose, which are: 

1. Reducing the risk of Parkinson disease
2. Has a protective effect against some cancer
3. mild diuretic capability to some illness that not related with cardiovascular disease.

For pregnant women, consuming caffeine more than 200 mg per day could disturb her health and fetus. The other negative effects are: 

1. Accelerating your heart rate
2. Increasing your blood pressure by inhibiting the Adenosine hormone activity
3. Causing cardiac arrhythmia
4. Disturbing psycho motor stability
5. Increasing uric acid that can result a kidney stone.

I believe all the negative effects are closely related to my heart failure condition.  The second 50 mg in the second day of caffeine had already made me feel my left chest very annoying, increasing pain and heart rate, which finally made me sleepless and tired.  The collateral effect that I barely resist was the problem of breathing.  I felt my lungs were failed to expand naturally, so that I needed to do it "manually" using my conscious muscle power or they just stopped acting. I didn't know whether I finally slept or just fell unconscious at dawn, because my body was exhausted. Thank God for waking me up again the next day. The bad effect was fading out in the next 4-6 hours later, leaving me a good lesson of consuming caffeine that my body cannot tolerate for such illness.  For your information, in my normal condition I also don't have a good tolerance for black coffee, except of tea. Perhaps another patients of CHF would have a better tolerance of small amount of caffeine that I took. As my EF is 26%, I suggest those who has lower EF to avoid caffeine in all the way.

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