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Asked by f1nn to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 19 Nov 2013.
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Matthew Tomlinson answered on 19 Nov 2013:
Like most things in life too much of a good thing can be harmful so yes caffeine can kill you, but the amount you need is huge! It has a lethal dose at about 150 – 200 milligrams per kilogram of weight, so if you weigh 60kg a lethal dose is about 12 grams of pure caffeine, which is around 90 cups of coffee and I think you’d be having problems a long time before you got to that many cups!
As it’s a stimulant too much caffeine can cause problems like fidgeting, anxiety, irritability and irregular heartbeat. I would assume the mechanism of death would be mostly due to heart arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) and there are problems with things like caffeine pills giving huge doses, in fact I know somebody who once took an entire packet of Proplus tablets and passed out, so it’s not something to mess about with.
However science runs on coffee, so it’s a good thing it’s not lethal at the doses we have!
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David Christensen answered on 19 Nov 2013:
Yes caffeine apparently can kill you! But, you would need to drink a lot of coffee to do it and you probably couldn’t manage to drink enough. I’ve read that the highest amount of caffeine ever ingested was only 100 grams which doesn’t seem like much, but apparently you would need to drink around 1000 cups of coffee in one go to get that much caffeine. If you get pure caffeine and inject it into yourself, then it probably would be fairly easy to kill yourself with 10 grams or maybe less. Please don’t do this f1nn!
Caffeine is a drug that affects your central nervous system that controls a lot of your bodies functions. Caffeine and coffee can make you jittery and anxious and affect your blood pressure. With high doses, it can lead to extremely low blood pressure, seizures and heart beat rhythm problems. Caffeine has this effect by attaching to receptors on cells that allow messages to be sent to those cells. By stopping these receptors and the signals working normally, caffeine can lead to increased heart rate and affect your kidneys to make you more dehydrated. It can also lead to the muscles around your blood vessels relaxing so that blood pressure drops and less oxygen is delivered to the cells around your body. As less oxygen gets around the body and the blood flow is reduced, your cells will start to produce more of an acid called lactic acid that is normally produced only during exercise. This can be quite dangerous. All of this might start to make your muscles breakdown too.
Although this all sounds quite bad, for caffeine to be dangerous, you would really have to drink a huge amount. Recent research suggested that drinking 4 cups of coffee might not be good for you, but other research has suggested that it is actually good for you, so nobody really knows whether it is or isn’t good for you in that amount. If you drink a lot more than 4 cups of coffee a day, then it probably isn’t very healthy, but it won’t kill you quickly!
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