Memory and coffee
Drinking more than three cups of coffee a day helped protect older women against some age-related memory decline, giving women more reason to love the world’s most popular stimulant.
“The more coffee one drank, the better the effects seemed to be on (women’s) memory functioning in particular,” said Karen Ritchie at the French National Institute of Medical Research, whose work appears in the journal, Neurology.
The researchers followed more than 7000 men and women in three French cities, checking their health and mental function and asking them about their current and past eating and drinking habits, their friends, and their daily activities.
The study found women who drank more than three cups of coffee per day, or its caffeine equivalent in tea, retained more of their verbal and - to a lesser extent - visual memories over four years.Women over 80 reaping more benefits from these beverages than those who were 10 to 15 years younger.
But the researchers didn’t find a similarly protective effect in men, although other studies have found a benefit to males.How might caffeine help ward off cognitive decline? “It is a cognitive stimulant,” said Ritchie.
It also helps to reduce levels of the protein called beta amyloid in the brain, she said, “whose accumulation is responsible for Alzheimer’s disease but which also occurs in normal aging.”Ritchie said she wasn’t sure why men in the study didn’t benefit from caffeine. “Our hypothesis is that either women metabolize caffeine differently than men, or there may be an interaction [of the caffeine] with the sex hormones, the estrogen-progesterone balance,” she said.
Some studies in mice have suggested that caffeine might block the buildup of proteins that lead to mental decline.Ritchie is not sure why only women benefited in her study.