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Well, looks like I’m switching to iced tea in the mornings.
Dismal news of the week is a new study that says drinking too much coffee can shrink the brain and help cause dementia.
And among all the ways I don’t want to go, that ranks about number one. Dementia doesn’t just kill you, but does it slowly—leaving you exposed first to years of humiliation, and vulnerable to neglect and abuse.
A new study of nearly 18,000 people aged 37 to 73 has found that those who drank more than six cups of coffee a day had a 53% higher risk of dementia. On the one hand, six cups of coffee is a lot. On the other hand, 53% is a big, big increase.
“Accounting for all possible permutations, we consistently found that higher coffee consumption was significantly associated with reduced brain volume — essentially, drinking more than six cups of coffee a day may be putting you at risk of brain diseases such as dementia and stroke,” says lead research Kitty Pham, a doctoral research candidate at the University of South Australia.
Professor Elina Hyponnen adds: “Together with other genetic evidence and a randomised controlled trial, these data strongly suggest that high coffee consumption can adversely affect brain health.”
Yikes.
OK, so there are studies that point in both directions on coffee and brain health. “Lifelong coffee/caffeine consumption has been associated with prevention of cognitive decline, and reduced risk of developing stroke, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease,” concluded the medical journal Practical Neurology just five years ago.
But if there’s one thing we know about brain health, dementia and Alzheimer’s, it’s how little anyone knows. Many of the studies on coffee and brain health seem to involve small numbers of people, and to find correlations more than causations. Maybe people with healthier brains are more likely to drink coffee, rather than the other way around.
On the other hand, there’s this study which found that caffeine withdrawal symptoms increased blood flow to the brain. And this study which found that even over a short, 10-day period, caffeine consumption could shrink the volume of gray matter in the brain.
It’s impossible to produce an ideal study, because you can’t effectively lock up two large, representative samples of people for multiple decades, feed some of them coffee and some of them a placebo, and see what happens.
The latest study, while conducted in Australia, is based on data from the massive United Kingdom Biobank database.
University of South Australia’s Hyponnen says the data have a cautionary message about drinking coffee to excess. One or two cups of coffee a day may be fine, she says. It’s when you’re drinking a lot of coffee—and six cups a day is plenty—that they find reasons to worry. So if you’re a light coffee drinker, maybe there are no grounds to worry.
On the other hand, I’m not a light drinker. And I’d go a long way to minimize my risk of dementia. Like many of you, I’ve seen it up close. And my takeaway was: Please, Lord, not me.
Alzheimer’s and other dementias are currently killing 6 million Americans and torturing their families. There is no cure, no vaccine, and no Operation Warp Speed to find one really fast.
According to the Alzheimer’s Association, caring for people with dementia costs Americans $300 billion a year. Federal funding for research is $3 billion.
I really like coffee, and I make my own cold brew by the amazing, high-tech, how-do-they-charge-$5-for-this-stuff technique of leaving a jar of fresh ground coffee and water in the fridge overnight. But when it comes down to it, I’m not wedded to the coffee. Any CDS, or caffeine delivery system, will do me just fine. So I’m happy to switch to iced tea—which is even easier to make because tea comes in a bag and doesn’t need to be filtered. So far the evidence about tea and the brain seems more cheerful.
The biggest danger is that they’ll do another study and find out tea also causes dementia. If that happens, I’d have to give up caffeine. Or maybe I could give up looking at scientific studies.
