2-3 cups of coffee a day may reduce dementia risk, but not if it's decaf: Study
· Toronto Sun
That daily coffee run might be doing more than just waking you up. It could be helping your brain, too.
A large, long-term U.S. study suggests that drinking caffeinated coffee in moderation may be linked to a lower risk of developing dementia. Researchers found that people who regularly drank two to three cups of coffee — or one to two cups of tea — each day were less likely to develop dementia compared to those who drank little or none.
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The catch: Caffeine seems to matter
The study found that caffeinated coffee intake was “significantly associated” with a lower dementia risk, while decaf didn’t show the same benefit. In fact, “decaffeinated coffee intake was not significantly associated with dementia risk,” according to the researchers.
The findings come from a massive study published in JAMA , led by scientists from Mass General Brigham, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Researchers tracked the health and diet of 131,821 nurses and other health-care professionals over as long as 43 years, looking at dementia diagnoses, cognitive decline, and test scores.
Scale and length of study make it stand out
“This is a very large, rigorous study conducted long term among men and women,” Aladdin Shadyab, a public health and medicine professor at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the research, told The New York Times .
The results showed that people who drank several cups of caffeinated coffee a day had about an 18% lower risk of developing dementia compared to those who rarely drank it. Tea drinkers saw similar benefits, reinforcing the idea that caffeine could be playing a key role — though researchers say more work is needed to fully understand why.
Over the course of the study, about 8% of participants — 11,033 people — were diagnosed with dementia.
Researchers caution against seeing coffee as cure-all
“While our results are encouraging, it’s important to remember that the effect size is small,” said senior author Daniel Wang in an interview with The Harvard Gazette . He added that coffee or tea could be “one piece of the puzzle” when it comes to protecting brain health.
There’s also a limit to the benefits. Drinking more than two to three cups of coffee — or one to two cups of tea — didn’t seem to offer extra protection. Researchers say that could be because the body can only process so much of the beneficial compounds.
More importantly, the study doesn’t prove cause and effect. It’s possible that coffee and tea drinkers have other lifestyle habits that help lower their dementia risk.
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