Memory Slow? Drink Some Joe

Older women who consume 3 cups a day have sharper cognitive skills, study says.

By Kathleen Doheny
HealthDay Reporter
Monday, August 6, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

MONDAY, Aug. 6 (HealthDay News) -- Coffee may jolt more than just the nervous system. A new French study found that caffeine seemed to help preserve the cognitive skills of older women.

Women who drank three or more cups of coffee a day were 30 percent less likely to have memory decline at age 65 than whose who drank one cup or less daily.

And the benefit increased with age. Women over age 80 who drank three or more cups of coffee a day were about 70 percent less likely to have memory decline than those who drank one cup or less, the researchers said.

Caffeinated tea had the same effect in the women, the study found, although more was needed to get the same caffeine boost. "Count roughly two cups of tea for a cup of coffee," said study leader Karen Ritchie of INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research.

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.

Ritchie and her colleagues recruited more than 7,000 women and men from three French cities. All were dementia-free at the start of the study. The researchers evaluated cognitive performance with a series of tests, such as verbal recall, asking people to demonstrate how many words they could repeat back after hearing them in 30 seconds. The evaluations were done at the start of the study and then two and four years later.

The researchers also asked about caffeine consumption at each evaluation.