Coffee and pregnancy outcomes

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This lack of high quality randomized trials means that we still don’t know the truth about the impact of coffee consumption during pregnancy. Six years after publishing the first version of this review, and after two updates, the implications of our findings remain the same: we need some large, high quality randomised trials. And, these trials need to measure outcomes of particular importance to women and their families and to the practitioners who provide care during their pregnancy, such as miscarriage, low birth weight, preterm birth, perinatal mortality, sudden infant death syndrome and maternal diabetes. However, we recognise that doing these trials will be challenging. Long-term outcome measures in evaluating caffeine intake during pregnancy may be difficult or even unethical. In order to impact outcomes such as miscarriage or birth defects, changes in coffee drinking might need to happen before pregnancy or in very early pregnancy. Furthermore, it’s not clear how much caffeine, in what shape or form, with what quality, can cause fetal or maternal problems, if any. In summary, we sadly still don’t know all that much about the effect of restricting coffee during pregnancy, and we hope that our future updates might contain the evidence needed to help resolve the uncertainties.”

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