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Coffee Linked to Mental
Abilities in Elderly Women
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
The investigators obtained their findings
from tests of mental acuity in 890 women and 638 men. Participants
were, on average, around 73 years old.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology
2002;156:842-850.
Reference
Source 89
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