In my talk I will report on recent work with Hansjörg Geiges about a strong connection between the topology of a contact manifold and the existence of contractible periodic Reeb orbits. Namely, if the contact manifold appears as non-trivial contact connected sum and has non-trivial fundamental group or torsion-free homology, then the existence is ensured. This generalizes a result of Helmut Hofer in dimension three.