The Annals of Internal Medicine has released a study that shows that coffee drinking, even a long-term multi-cups-per-day coffee habit, is not associated with increased deaths among women. And among women who reported drinking two to three cups per day, the study found a 25 percent lower risk of deaths from heart disease.

The study is called “The Relationship of Coffee Consumption with Mortality” and was funded by a research grant from the National Institutes of Health. It was led by Esther Lopez-Garcia of Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain. Among the most intriguing findings is the suggestion that drinking large amounts of coffee may actually be beneficial to women.

The study followed 84,214 women from 1980 to 2004, each a participant in the well-regarded Nurses’ Health Study, which Wikipedia calls “the most definitive long-term epidemiological studies conducted to date on older women’s health.”