- NEW YORK (Reuters Health)
- Elderly women who drank relatively large amounts of coffee over their
lifetimes appear to out-perform less frequent coffee drinkers in certain
tests of mental abilities, according to new study findings.
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- Researchers from the University of California, San Diego
in La Jolla found that women who reported being frequent lifetime coffee
drinkers performed better than non-coffee drinkers in memory tests involving
words and shapes, and in calculation and category tests, in which they
named as many animals as they could in 1 minute.
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- Women at least 80 years old who were lifetime coffee
drinkers outperformed their peers on 11 out of 12 tests, although the results
did not reach statistical significance. This suggests that the relationship
between coffee and mental acuity may become stronger as women age, the
authors report.
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- These findings are supported by previous research that
suggests that caffeine--of which coffee is the main source--produces certain
effects in the body that improve memory and repair memory impairments.
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- People tend to experience a decline in their mental functioning
from age 60 on, the researchers note, and the current findings suggest
that, in women, coffee may counteract that process.
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- "It is biologically plausible that caffeine lessens
age-related cognitive decline," Dr. Marilyn Johnson-Kozlow and her
colleagues write in the recent issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.
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- The investigators obtained their findings from tests
of mental acuity in 890 women and 638 men. Participants were, on average,
around 73 years old.
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- During the study, the participants completed questionnaires
regarding how many cups of coffee they drink on an average day, and the
number of years they had been coffee-drinkers. Regular coffee drinkers
were considered to be those who drank at least one cup of coffee each month,
and the highest category of consumers included people who currently downed
approximately 5 cups each day.
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- Johnson-Kozlow's team found that women who drank relatively
large amounts of coffee over their lifetimes outperformed their peers in
tests where they had to recall a list of words and reproduce a geometric
form after a delay of 30 minutes. High lifetime female coffee drinkers
also did better on tests where they counted backward from 100 in multiples
of seven, and spelled the word "world" backwards.
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- The link between coffee consumption and mental abilities
persisted when the authors factored in the effects of certain potential
confounders, such as age, education, and whether the women had received
estrogen replacement therapy, which previous studies have suggested may
boost memory.
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- However, coffee drinking was not linked to all of the
tests designed to measure participants' mental acuity, the authors note,
suggesting that caffeine may have a "differential effect," improving
mental functioning in some areas, but not others.
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- In terms of why mental functioning wasn't linked to coffee
drinking in men, the researchers suggest that the number of men included
in the study may not have been large enough to detect an effect. Alternatively,
they propose that some silent factor may be either clouding the relationship
in men, or creating a false relationship in women.
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- However, men and women may also simply respond differently
to caffeine, Johnson-Kuzlow and her colleagues add. "Gender differences
may be due to pharmacodynamic differences in sensitivity to caffeine effects
between men and women," they suggest.
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- SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology 2002;156:842-850.
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