Energy drinks and stimulant supplements appear far more in heart event reports

What happened

Energy drinks and stimulant supplements turned up far more often in FDA adverse-event reports that mentioned cardiac arrest and heart attack, according to a research abstract from the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2026. The AHA news release is dated Nov. 2, and the work is being presented Nov. 6–9 in Chicago, as first reported by Healthline News.

Healthline's summary calls it an "11-fold increase" in cardiac arrest. We'd word it more carefully. The study counts how often these products appear in reports, not how likely a user is to have an event.

One more correction to the record: Healthline's page title refers to adults under 35. The 4.5-times heart attack figure compares all reports and isn't specific to that age group.

What the study actually found

The authors ran a disproportionality analysis, which asks whether certain products show up more often in reports of certain events than you'd expect. They looked at 28,345 voluntary adverse-event reports from 2017 to 2025, all from people 13 or older.

• 854 reports (roughly 3%) mentioned energy drinks or supplements containing caffeine or other stimulants.
• 27,491 reports involved products without those ingredients, such as soft drinks, meal-replacement shakes, protein bars, smoothies and vitamins.
• Stimulants counted included caffeine, methylxanthines (guarana, yerba mate, green tea or coffee extracts) and sympathomimetics (synephrine, yohimbine, ephedra, DMAA, higenamine).

Products were grouped by ingredient, not brand, so the results speak to product types. The release doesn't name the database. It is probably the FDA's CAERS system for foods and supplements, but that's our inference.

Patterns were similar in men and women. About 45% of the cardiovascular reports linked to these products involved adults 18 to 34. Lead author Sai Samayamanthula is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and the AHA describes the work as independent.

What it does not show

Start with the status: AHA abstracts aren't peer-reviewed, and the findings stay preliminary until a full paper is published. The authors themselves say the design shows associations only.

The bigger gap is the denominator. Nobody knows how many people used these products without a problem, or how many events never got reported. So the numbers say nothing about actual incidence. The FDA says a report in its system doesn't mean the product caused the event, and that reports are voluntary and sometimes incomplete or duplicated.

The young-adult angle is also only partly supported. That 45% share tells you who appears in the reports. The release doesn't give the age split of the comparison group, so it can't say young adults are at higher risk than older ones. Researchers don't know why they feature so often. Possibilities the release lists include how often they use the products, using them before intense exercise or with alcohol or drugs, and undiagnosed heart conditions.

The release also gives no confidence intervals, no event counts and no named statistic. We couldn't open the abstract listing, so we can't fill those in.

What it means for you

This is a caution flag, not a verdict. The lead author told the AHA that occasional use probably carries little risk for many healthy people, but regular users can quickly exceed recommended caffeine limits.

• Read the label for total caffeine and for stimulant ingredients like synephrine, yohimbine, DMAA, higenamine or ephedra.
• Add up everything in a day. A pre-workout plus an energy drink plus coffee is how people overshoot.
• Skip mixing these products with alcohol or drugs. The release raises that as a possible factor, and it costs you nothing to avoid.
• If you have a known heart condition, check with a clinician before using them, and get medical care for chest pain, fainting or a racing heart.

If you rely on these for focus or workouts daily, the practical move is to treat them as something to dose, not a default.

Context: the AHA's caffeine guidance

The AHA's fact sheet on its 2026 caffeine statement says up to 400 mg a day is considered safe for most adults, about 3 to 5 eight-ounce cups of plain black coffee. Brewed coffee has roughly 9.4 to 20.6 mg of caffeine per fluid ounce. Energy shots can have 40 to 69 mg per serving, roughly three to four times the per-ounce figure for brewed coffee.

The statement links energy-drink-level caffeine to higher blood pressure and irregular heart rhythm. Its main subject, though, is coffee, so the energy-drink findings are a smaller part of its evidence. The AHA release adds that some pre-workout supplements contain more than 12 times the caffeine per fluid ounce of brewed coffee.

These products are regulated as foods or dietary supplements, so they don't go through the premarket safety testing required for medications. Healthline also cites a 2024 study of sudden cardiac arrest after energy-drink use and a 2025 review, which we haven't checked at the source. The next test is the full paper, with its statistics and age breakdown.