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With all the health benefits that researchers, news blogs (including us here at counsel&heal) and perhaps even the mainstream masses claim coffee has, such as helping us live longer, regulating our digestive system, as well as helping to sustain a healthy sex drive, not everything is all good.

Besides stunting your growth if drunk to early in life, a new study warns frequent coffee drinkers to limit their intake to reduce their chances of developing vision loss or blindness: which research says are associated with one another. 

"Scandinavian populations have the highest frequencies of exfoliation syndrome and glaucoma," said author, Jae Hee Kang, ScD, of Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Mass. "Because Scandinavian populations also have the highest consumption of caffeinated coffee in the world, and our research group has previously found that greater caffeinated coffee intake was associated with increased risk of primary open-angle glaucoma, we conducted this study to evaluate whether the risk of exfoliation glaucoma or glaucoma suspect may be different by coffee consumption." 

A meta-analysis of 78,977 women from the Nurses' Health Study (NHS) and 41,202 men from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS) who were at least 40 years of age and who answered a detailed questionnaire about how frequently they drank specific caffeinated and decaffeinated drinks if at all, results showed that, compared to abstainers, participants who drank three cups or more of caffeinated coffee daily were at an increased risk of developing exfoliation glaucoma or glaucoma suspect. 

Researchers also noted that there were no clear associations with consumption of other caffeinated products, such as soda, tea, chocolate or decaffeinated coffee and Glaucoma. The results also showed that women with a family history of glaucoma were at an increased risk.