Coffee’s good. Coffee’s bad. Whatever, I don’t drink the stuff.
But now a study is saying that “middle-aged people who drank between three and five cups of coffee a day lowered their risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by between 60 and 65 percent later in life.”
So people are saying coffee is good because of this. But my question is: how do they know it’s the coffee that reduced the risk? Maybe the same genes that made them love coffee so much gave them a reduced risk of dementia. Or maybe people who drink 3-5 cups a day of coffee also have similar activities that have nothing to do with the coffee.
Sure, maybe it’s the coffee. But cause and effect can be tricky.
What do you think?
Yeah, it doesn’t sound like a definitive study. But no doubt the follow-up studies that come up with a definitive answer one way or the other won’t make the news…
I think that, in light of many studies that have implied that small doses of anything (I’m thinking of the phthalates scare going on), it is not completely unreasonable to suggest that small amounts of whatever may be present in coffee may indeed help us with a long term disease that we do not completely understand. I hope more, rigerous studies are performed to fully investigate this possible causation- Hell, it might even lead to breakthroughs in our understanding.
I’ve also heard this same case for (I’m not lying!) cigarettes.
I’m wondering how much genes and the environment have to do with the findings of such studies.
I agree with wintermute, usually the follow up fails to make the headlines as well as the first finding.
Lisa – on the cigarettes, It’s a little more complicated than that. Not a dig at you, but the information has apparently been mangled in the passing.
Actually, it’s pretty well established that cigarettes can help alleviate the symptoms of Alzheimers. The current best Alzheimers treatment (last time I checked) was Aricept, which blocks acetylcholine breakdown (i.e. increases it’s activity, as it sticks around longer); and nicotine is well known to stimulate acetylcholine receptors (there’s actually an entire class called “nicotinic” for this very reason).
As a preventative, you’ll probably find the increased risk of cancer and other complications will dramatically cut down your life expectancy and pretty much shoot any positive effects out of the window.
As for how they know it’s coffee, I’ve just tracked down the abstract:
Abstract: Caffeine stimulates central nervous system on a short term. However, the long-term impact of caffeine on cognition remains unclear. We aimed to study the association between coffee and/or tea consumption at midlife and dementia/Alzheimer’s disease (AD) risk in late-life. Participants of the Cardiovascular Risk Factors, Aging and Dementia (CAIDE) study were randomly selected from the survivors of a population-based cohorts previously surveyed within the North Karelia Project and the FINMONICA study in 1972, 1977, 1982 or 1987 (midlife visit). After an average follow-up of 21 years, 1409 individuals (71%) aged 65 to 79 completed the re-examination in 1998. A total of 61 cases were identified as demented (48 with AD). Coffee drinkers at midlife had lower risk of dementia and AD later in life compared with those drinking no or only little coffee adjusted for demographic, lifestyle and vascular factors, apolipoprotein E ε4 allele and depressive symptoms. The lowest risk (65% decreased) was found in people who drank 3-5 cups per day. Tea drinking was relatively uncommon and was not associated with dementia/AD. Coffee drinking at midlife is associated with a decreased risk of dementia/AD later in life. This finding might open possibilities for prevention of dementia/AD. (emphasis added)
I’m not sure how they “controlled” for lifestyle factors – haven’t got the paper – but as it was interview based it’s not impossible. It’s although worth pointing out that the same cohort of patients (the CAIDE study) was used to investigate the relationship between physical activity in midlife and dementia.
I’m not an epidemiologist, so I can’t really comment on how strong this correlation is.
On a side note, I found it pretty interesting that the Yahoo article played up the idea that it was coffee (rich in antioxidants!) and the abstract focussed on caffeine. Interestingly, they mention that there weren’t enough tea drinkers in the cohort to make a comparison, I’d be interested to see if it did have any effect.
Hmm… it seems only a week ago I was hearing that high blood pressure can lead to ‘micro-strokes’, which go completely unnoticed, but eventually lead to brain degeneration and dementia.
Coffee has been named a cause of high blood pressure.
Maybe it’s really hot beverages, or cream and sugar that fight disease — well enough to offset the dangers of caffeine. Ha ha.
Coffee is awesome.
And nicotine has been a known memory enhancer for quite a while now I think. I don’t smoke though. I keep meaning to try, and then I forget.
I try to keep my coffee consumption low. I sometimes go weeks with no coffee at all, and few soft drinks.
As far as the health effects go, I do know a cup of caffenated coffee (or Coke) seems to be very effective at helping my migrane headaches go away. I don’t know why it works, but it seems to.
Simple. One sample group was secretly given hot water with a brown crayon dipped in it for thirty-six years. They did not show any reduced % in alzheimers.
Confused-
I think what I was trying to get at is that there doesn’t seem to be a lack of evidence pro or against for just about any substance. I just said it rather poorly….
I think that these test results are similar to statistics. You can pretty much make anything look good or bad, depending on what you want.
Jim-
I also think that when both were drank no one noticed the difference in taste. Our coffee here at work tastes similar to the brown crayon concoction, I’m betting.
Coffee is an odd drink. I find that of all the legal stimulants (tea, Red Bull, colas), coffee is the only one that gets my brain going to be creative. A cup of strong (shade-grown, free-trade, tastiness) coffee and I just feel jazzed to draw.
I don’t drink it every day, preferring to save that effect for a full weekend’s work on personal art projects (and not waste that feeling at work; there I just drink tea). It works best in the mornings for the sketching process.
I gave up Diet Coke (and the like) about six months ago after a many-year 40- 60 oz a day habit. I guess I don’t have an addictive personality.
@atheistyogi it might have something to do with caffeine increasing bloodflow?
Did they also study any other commonalities in the groups diet, lifestyle, environment, etc.
It just seems there could be too many other commonalities to me.
It is always difficult to judge studies like these because they rely heavily on self-reporting. It would be interesting if they could replicate these findings in animal studies. They could then also isolate the various compounds in coffee that affect the brain, its not just caffeine. I also heard an interesting report on the effects of pharmacudical doses of vitamin B on blocking and repairing Altzheimer’s damage. Anyone know anything more about that?
My guess: someone who drinks that much coffee in a day is probably not doing it for the fun of it. The high consumption of caffeine is probably indicative of an active mental life, which also predicts greater resilience against dementia. The abstract says they controlled for lifestyle, but that’s a rather broad term, and I wonder how many dimensions of lifestyle they could really control for.
3-5 cups, huh? I think I remember a study suggesting that exercise helps prevent alzheimer’s. Since caffeine can be a diuretic, I figure 3-5 cups in the morning will have you running to the bathroom enough to qualify as exercise.
Coffee consumption is not the immediate cause; it’s just that coffee helps one say more effective prayers. ;-)
Not if you’re Mormon.
I think it’s the deliciousness factor.
@Ty
In the house I shared when I was younger we used to have a friend (Mormon family) who would come over on Sunday when his parents were at Church and bring a big bottle of coke and a his own adult video – luckily I had better things to do with my Sunday mornings. Now if there is a god you’ve got to burn in hell for this one!
As for coffee I don’t understand what all the fuss is about as I drink tea and when I say tea I mean real tea. I’ve lost counts of the number of times that I’ve been abroad and someone will be most pleased that they’ve got some tea in … then the Lipton Yellow label is produced and I have to smile and say how nice it is. I’m now in the habit of taking some Assam tea with me!
Ah yes, the eternal struggle of science between correlation and causation. No easy answers unfortunately, which is what makes science so much more powerful and true. No magic wand to wave and say ‘God did it’, we have to find out ourselves through trial and error and rigorous testing and examination.
I drink about 3 cups a day myself. Good to know I have a reduced risk of Alzheimers. Heart-failure’s still going to get me though. :)
“Sure, maybe it’s the coffee. But cause and effect can be tricky.
What do you think?”
I agree. If this stuff is true, then I’ll never have Old-Timer’s.
I drink at least eight cups of coffee a day!
Makes sense. Caffeine is a frontal lobe stimulant. If someone was routinely stimulating neurons in their frontal lobe, it stands to reason that they could have healthier, more active neurons that would be a bit more impervious to dementia. The funny thing is that nicotine is also a frontal lobe stimulant. I’m sure smokers probably suffer less from Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, I don’t think you can list death by lung cancer as a preventative measure.
I remember reading a similar article about a year ago, while I was drinking coffee even. I’ve cut back to an average 2-4 cups a day. I drink it like a lot of people drink soda, which I’m not fond of. Like most things, I think the good vs bad comes down to moderation.
It’s also said that keeping an active lifestyle and exercising the brain (crossword puzzles, etc) help against Alzheimer’s.
Dutchgirl- Basically, B1 is necessary for neural functions. Symptoms of deficiency include confusion, depression, and insomnia.
@ fancyfortunecookies
The idea of large cohort studies is to gather data on many thousands of people so that when you want to do a specific study you can select only those with certain control factors and still have enough subjects to make your statistics reasonable. They may have data for 20 000 subjects, but this particular study selected only those who, say, lived in a specific environment, had selected dietary factors, had no family history of Alzheimer’s, no cardiovascular disease or history of stroke, had normal blood pressure and/or whatever other factors they felt relevant. One of the reasons that Finland is the site of one of the world’s largest cohort studies is that the population is relatively free from outside genetic influence, so the genetic factors are more controllable.
Maybe it’s a pity I can’t tolerate more than 2 cups of coffee a day any more. Then again, with my family history tends to indicate that I’ll die with a bunch of other nasty bodily ailments but my mind fully intact. I’ve yet to decide if this is a good thing :-)
Hmmm. . . don’t know about this. My mother had dementia her last year of living before the colon cancer got her. She drank four or five cups of coffee every day. In fact, during her last months that’s about all she consumed. I doubt that it helped or hurt her dementia in the long run. I only know that she enjoyed having coffee and it made her feel good. I don’t know if it contributed to the cancer.
Whether coffee is good for you or not probably has as much to do with how it fits into your daily health routines. Coffee, junk food, and a sedentary lifestyle may contribute to an early demise. Coffee and healthy balanced diet with exercise would probably be a great thing.
LA
GRE Analytical Writing argument tasks are like this. You hit it.
It is tricky but this isn’t a new. Studies on caffeine and nicotine have been going on for years. Nicotine is the biggest confounding factor for predicting Parkinson disease. There’s something in the thousands of chemcials that are inahled that seem to have some kind of neuroprotective property. Even when age and life span are accounted for. Tricky indeed because is it the cigarette or the ability to be a risk taker that seperates PD folks from the pack? We’re trying to figure those things out.
It’s very frustrating when non-scientific news media reports these findings because it makes it sound as though these scientists are syaing “Drink massive amounts of coffee and you will escape dementia” when what they’re really saying is, “Huh, it looks like caffeine might have an effect. Now we have to start looking at why.”
Who cares about cause and effect. The point is that I as a heavy coffee drinker have a statistical less chance of getting Alzheimer’s. Remember that.
The mechanism by how consuming caffeine might work in treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease is presented in a study out today. See
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-07/uosf-crm070109.php
In this study, they worked with mice but confirmed that caffeine consumption led to reduction in amyloid-beta, implicated in Alzheimer’s. They cited other work showing that this occurs in people too and hope to start a large scale clinical trial. The study’s major finding was that caffeine, in particular, had a very dramatic impact on dealing with the equivalent of Alzheimer’s in the test mice.
I, of course, began drinking decaf last year. Oh well.