Sure, it takes you 2 to 3 cups of coffee just to feel alive enough to speak to another human being without snapping, but what some call an addiction, at the very least a dependency, others in the scientific community call dementia prevention.
A new large study tracking more than 130,000 people for up to four decades found that moderate consumption of caffeinated coffee or tea was linked to a lower risk of dementia and slightly better cognitive function later in life. Of those 130,000, only 11,000 developed dementia over the study’s 43-year span.
The research, published in JAMA, and reported by the New York Times, followed participants from two long-running studies of nurses and other medical professionals, folks who are typically chugging coffee to remain alert as they try to keep others alive and well. The ones who consistently drank two or three cups of coffee a day, or one or two cups of tea, were significantly less likely to develop dementia. Compare that to people who drank near zero caffeine, moderate coffee drinkers had about a 20 percent lower risk of dementia, while tea drinkers saw about a 15 percent reduction.
The effect didn’t increase with heavier consumption, setting the sweet spot at around two or three cups, with everything else other than that only serving to make you jittery. If you’re wondering if it was more the beans than the caffeine, you’re mistaken, as a decaf didn’t show the same association.
The findings stayed the same even after research was adjusted for a long list of potential disruptors, like education, income, whether or not the participant smoked, regularly drank, their diet, their body weight, their mental health, and their genetic risk for Alzheimer’s.
Caffeine consumption also showed up in other ways, like how people who drank more caffeinated coffee reported fewer subjective memory problems. A subgroup of older women performed slightly better on cognitive tests, suggesting to the researchers that their mental decline was slowed by several months, possibly thanks to caffeinated coffee.
Absolutely none of this proves that caffeine directly prevents dementia. It’s going to take a lot more research to make any definitive claims like that, if it can ever be definitively made at all. But considering the size, duration, and repeated dietary tracking of this massive study, it all comes together to create one of the strongest observational studies on the topic to date.
Don’t interpret these results as meaning that you’ve got to start pounding java any more than you do. If you’re already drinking 2 to 3 cups a day, your sleep is probably a mess, but take all this as a little reassurance that you might have been accidentally doing your part in staving off dementia.
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