Almost all of us do it. Maybe we had a few too many the night before a big exam. Maybe our friends dragged us out to the club when we would just rather stay in. For one reason or another, we down a few energy drinks to get a quick pep in our step. But new studies are finding this type of behaviour might be riskier than we thought.
According to a recent study, researchers now say that healthy adults who down sugary energy drinks, which are also high in the amino acid taurine, had increased heart contraction rates an hour later.
“We’ve shown that energy drink consumption has a short-term impact on cardiac contractility,” said Jonas Dörner, M.D., of the University of Bonn, Germany in a news release. "There are concerns about the products’ potential adverse side effects on heart function, especially in adolescents and young adults, but there is little or no regulation of energy drink sales.”
The researchers did a cardiac MRI on 18 healthy adults both before and after consuming a caffeinated energy drink with taurine, revealing more peak strain in the heart’s left ventricle, where oxygenated blood flows from the lungs and is pumped to the aorta. The study comes off the back of recent findings in the US that reveled trips to the emergency room hit 20,000, doubling from the previous year. Researchers advise people with known cardiac arrhythmias to avoid energy drinks, hypothesizing that changes in contractility could provoke arrhythmias.