Drinking two cups of coffee `cuts stroke risk`

Here`s some good news for coffee buffs -- drinking two to three cups of the beverage can significantly reduce your risk of a stroke, says a new study.

Researchers in Sweden have carried out the study and found that drinking coffee can cut the chances of a clot on the brain by 14 per cent, while three or four cups reduce the dangers by 17 per cent, a newspaper reported.

However, six or more only cut the likelihood by around seven percent, says the study.

Antioxidants may be responsible -- other caffeinated drinks such as tea do not bring the benefits but decaffeinated coffee does, according to the researchers at the Karolinska
Institute in Stockholm.

For their study, the researchers pooled all the results from eight previous researches involving nearly half-a-million people since the mid-1960s.

According to them, coffee may protect the brain from so-called "bad" cholesterol but fears of increased blood pressure remain.

The findings have been published in the `American Journal of Epidemiology`.