Good News for Coffee Drinkers (if You’re Careful)!

Coffee drinkers often hear bad health news about coffee and caffeine. Well, here’s some good news. As long as you’re careful, coffee could help protect your memory as you age. . . .

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) affects as many as 42% of seniors. People with MCI may have some difficulty with memory, thinking, language and judgement, but the trouble is not bad enough to cause the serious problems of Alzheimer’s Disease. Not everyone with MCI will develop dementia, but MCI is associated with an increased risk.

A new study has found that drinking coffee can lower your risk of MCI. But it’s confusing: you have to drink the right amount, and you have to be cosistent.

The study followed 1,445 people between the ages of sixty-five and eighty-five for an average of three and a half years. It found that cognitively healthy people who regularly drink one or two cups of coffee a day have lower rates of MCI than people who rarely or never drink coffee. People who have one cup a day have 53% lower rates, and people who drink two have 69% lower rates.

But here’s where it gets confusing. You have to stay constant. If you increase your coffee drinking from a cup a day to more, your risk for MCI now goes up by 80% compared to people who remain constant in their coffee drinking. If you decrease your coffee drinking from a cup a day to less, the risk more than doubles.

Once you go above two cups a day, there is no benefit over never drinking coffee.

This study suggests that, as far as the brain is concerned, there is a coffee drinking sweet spot, and that, strangely, you have to stay right in that sweet spot. Constant, moderate coffee drinking of a cup or two a day seems to be good for the brain; whereas, regularly drinking more than two cups a day takes away the benefit. And you not only need to be moderte, but constant: changing your habit increases your risk.

This study is consistent with other research that has found that for coffee drinking to be healthy, it has to be moderate. Another recent study found that, over a seventeen year follow up period, the risk of death from any cause goes up when you drink more than four cups of coffee a day.

Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease 2015;47:889-99