JUNE 6, 2013, 12:01 AM
This
column appears in the June 9 issue of The New York Times Magazine.
For
hundreds of years, coffee has been one of the two or three most popular
beverages on earth. But it’s only recently that scientists are figuring out
that the drink has notable health benefits. In one large-scale epidemiological study from
last year, researchers primarily at the National Cancer Institute parsed health
information from more than 400,000 volunteers, ages 50 to 71, who were free of
major diseases at the study’s start in 1995. By 2008, more than 50,000 of the
participants had died. But men who reported drinking two or three cups of
coffee a day were 10 percent less likely to have died than those who didn’t
drink coffee, while women drinking the same amount had 13 percent less risk of
dying during the study. It’s not clear exactly what coffee had to do with their
longevity, but the correlation is striking.
Other
recent studies have linked moderate coffee drinking — the equivalent of three
or four 5-ounce cups of coffee a day or a single venti-size Starbucks — with
more specific advantages: a reduction in the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, basal cell carcinoma (the
most common skin cancer), prostate
cancer, oral cancer and breast
cancer recurrence.
Perhaps
most consequential, animal experiments show that caffeine may reshape the
biochemical environment inside our brains in ways that could stave off
dementia. In a2012 experiment at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, mice were briefly starved of oxygen, causing them
to lose the ability to form memories. Half of the mice received a dose of
caffeine that was the equivalent of several cups of coffee. After they were
reoxygenated, the caffeinated mice regained their ability to form new memories
33 percent faster than the uncaffeinated. Close examination of the animals’
brain tissue showed that the caffeine disrupted the action of adenosine, a
substance inside cells that usually provides energy, but can become destructive
if it leaks out when the cells are injured or under stress. The escaped
adenosine can jump-start a biochemical cascade leading to inflammation, which
can disrupt the function of neurons, and potentially contribute to
neurodegeneration or, in other words, dementia.
In
a 2012 study of humans, researchers from the
University of South Florida and the University of Miami tested the blood levels
of caffeine in older adults with mild cognitive impairment, or the first
glimmer of serious forgetfulness, a common precursor of Alzheimer’s disease,
and then re-evaluated them two to four years later. Participants with little or
no caffeine circulating in their bloodstreams were far more likely to have
progressed to full-blown Alzheimer’s than those whose blood indicated they’d
had about three cups’ worth of caffeine.
There’s
still much to be learned about the effects of coffee. “We don’t know whether
blocking the action of adenosine is sufficient” to prevent or lessen the
effects of dementia, says Dr. Gregory G. Freund, a professor of pathology at
the University of Illinois who led the 2012 study of mice. It is also unclear
whether caffeine by itself provides the benefits associated with coffee
drinking or if coffee contains other valuable ingredients. In a 2011
study by the same researchers at the University of South
Florida, for instance, mice genetically bred to develop Alzheimer’s and then
given caffeine alone did not fare as well on memory tests as those provided
with actual coffee. Nor is there any evidence that mixing caffeine with large
amounts of sugar, as in energy drinks, is healthful. But a cup or three of
coffee “has been popular for a long, long time,” Dr. Freund says, “and there’s
probably good reasons for that.”
Source:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/this-is-your-brain-on-coffee/?ref=health&_r=0
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