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Coffee Can Reduce the Risk of Alzheimer's
Amenacier writes "Recent studies by Finnish and Swedish researchers have shown that drinking moderate amounts of coffee can reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease in people. The reason for this is as yet unknown, although it has been hypothesized that the high levels of antioxidants found in coffee may play a role in preventing dementia and Alzheimer's. Alternatively, some studies have shown that coffee can protect nerves, which may help prevent Alzheimer's. Other studies have shown that coffee may also help to protect against diabetes, another disease which has been shown to have links to Alzheimer's disease. However, researchers warn against drinking too much coffee, as 3 cups or more may cause hallucinations."
Now where did I put that cup of coffee... ?
An old couple both have Alzheimers. They're watching TV and an advert for a burger joint comes on.
"Hey," the man says, "burgers would be great! Could you make some? I'd like lettuce, tomatoes and onions on mine. Don't forget! Lettuce. Tomatoes. Onions."
Wife replies "Lettuce, tomatoes and onions. Got it. Lettuce, tomatoes and onions."
About 2 hours later she comes out of the kitchen and hands him a plate of bacon and eggs. "You idiot," he cries, "you forgot the toast!"
Trolling is a art,
Drink moderately and don't forget to rest. I wonder if this correlation is caused by the coffee?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Now I'll be able to remember all of those awesome hallucinations I've been having!
So if I drink 4 cups a day I won't get Alzheimers and I will hallucinate .... good, cause i want to remember the good ones.
I'm NEVER getting Alzheimer's!
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
of the people who claim that "wine" is good for you one glass a day. Fools! Its not the wine, its stuff from the grapes, which mind you are also present in fresh grapes, rasins, and grape juice. Wine gets the props though cause then it makes people feel better about getting drunk every night.
Same here, ya there might be a few healthy tidbits, but the negatives far out weight the health benifits.
Depends if you're talking to the experts paid by the coffee companies or the experts paid by the ... hum... tea companies? (what's the opposite of coffee?)
Better drink a whole bunch really fast. Next week, researchers will tell us it's bad again.
I drink just 8 cups per day and my doctor friend (who is pink and floats in the middle of air dancing) says that is all OK...
(what's the opposite of coffee?)
(Milk?)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
*gets distracted and runs off to the coffeemachine*
Now... what was I doing?
coffee can reduce the risk of alzheimer's
coffee can protect nerves
I rtfa but it didn't say how to apply the Coffee Can!
(I save them you know. You never know when a coffee can will come in handy. But I didn't expect this!)
I can see the fnords!
My grandmother died of alzheimer's related incident just after reaching her 100th birthday and just before Christmas. She, like myself, used to enjoy drinking tea - she used to have an occasional coffee with milk but usually tea. I drink tea by the pint mug full and have 2 or 3 whilst I'm at 'work' (part time/voluntary) in a normal mug and then sometimes 4, 5 or more big mugs of tea during the evening/night/morning. I am overweight (fighting hard to shed some lbs!) and have type 2 diabetes but surely tea still has caffeine in it? So should I stop drinking tea and take up coffee to avoid alzheimers in later life? I'm 'only' 55 now (18 in my head! :)) so maybe the sooner I start, the sooner I can 'protect' myself!
Then again look how many foodstuffs scientists and governments have told us over the years will kill or maim us or make us infertile or put us in a wheelchair for the rest of our life or some other horrorendous sounding scare tactic yet I'm the type who never listened and carried on regardless and thankfully I'm still here despite continuing to eat beef during the beef crisis or lamb ditto or ... nah, won't bore everyone listing them. I'm sure we all remember only too well. :)
So I'll carry on drinking tea until I get fed up with ... or maybe forget and start drinking coffee without realising it ... then maybe I'll start to believe that caffeine doesn't halt Alzheimers catching up with me but then maybe thankfully I won't be aware of it any longer so I'm off to think about something FAR more interesting and thoughtful and constructive! :D
(what's the opposite of coffee?)
In terms of competition for arable land, I guess that would be cocaine. Next we'll hear from the Cocaine Importation Agency (CIA) how bad coffee is for you.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
> Middle-aged people who drank between three and five cups of coffee a day ...
Doesn't that amount fall into the "danger" range for hallucinations? I wonder if there's any relationship between the parts of the brain that would be responsible for hallucinating and the parts that cause Alzheimer's? Also, if coffee can help block damage caused by cholesterol, would meds like Lipitor do the same thing? If it's a matter of antioxidants, wouldn't taking decent amounts of Vitamin C (which has a relatively high toxicity rate) do the same? Or drinking green tea? (And idea how common Alzheimer's is in cultures where tea is a regularly consumed beverage?)
Bark less. Wag more.
There's always exceptions to the rule. If 5% of the people who don't drink coffee get it, yet 2% who do drink it don't, then there's a good chance it has some positive effect.
That doesn't change the fact that 2% of the people drinking coffee STILL got it. It's all about reducing the odds.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Yeah, I seem to remember that some forms of Tea is also high in Antioxidants. I'm sure you could switch and not have to suffer the negative side affects from drinking coffee. Maybe that's too simple though....
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
eeffoc.
Minor correction, should read: "yet only 2% who do drink it get it"
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Idiot! You're supposed to take it out of the can first.
Kevin Smith on Prince
I would much rather have hallucinations than worsening memory loss. Hell, having to re-learn five times in a row that my mother has died was bad enough...
-- haaz.
All that has been shown is that there is a reduced probability that you will get Alzheimers. To make a D&D analogy, say getting alzheimers is a roll of four or more. If you don't drink coffee you have to roll a 20D but if you do drink coffee only roll an 8D. Combining all the other lifestyle factors that can be statistically linked to alzheimers means you're just changing the number of sides your dice has. Some will mean you need more sides and are more likely to get it and sometime less sides so you're less likely. Immunity would be if you could roll a three sided dice!
So, I wouldn't go around expecting drinking coffee to make you immune.
That's good cause neither the researchers or the article said you would be.
Maybe it isn't the coffee that prevents Alzheimer's. Maybe it's the hallucinations. I suggest a new study involving coffee and other hallucinogens.
I said opposite, not reverse. :)
However, researchers warn against drinking too much coffee, as 3 cups or more may cause hallucinations.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
-Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Then I should be seeing unicorns & emerald fairies by midday
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
!coffee
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
...a few months ago, after a particularly heavy coffee session, a video popped up on my PC screen that had some big fat sweaty bald bloke dancing across a big stage shouting "Developers" over and over again... and it was ALL the fault of that Java Sumatran blend...
Oh wait...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It's also been found effective against gout.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
But I wonder why "the age" was listed in this submission? I linked the AFP story from Yahoo news. There are a raft of newspapers to choiose this story from.
I guess the submitter was an Australian. But in any case, this study and the newspaper stories about it seem far above the "coffee makes you hallucinate". Hallucination is a sign of schitzophrenia.
A survey of one (me) backs up the anti-dementia study. I joke about forgetfulness, but I'm actually sharper than I was when I was young and drank less coffee. Sometimes correlation not only does not imply causation, it doesn't even always imply a link. I started drinking a lot of coffee as a cigarette substitute, and I think the niccotine had an adverse effect on my mental acuity.
Free Martian Whores!
If cofee can do it, green tea probably can do it better with fewer side effects.
Time to sip another cup of green tea...
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Aids and superaids? They're showing up as the top two tags, so is the implication that coffee prevents aids or causes superaids?
As soon as whoever has paid them to spout-off has profited from the societal behaviour-change they desire?
Requiem for the American Dream
Good luck finding that at the grocery store... "Excuse me, miss, where's the I Can't Believe It's Not Coffee?"
While I find your analogy a cludgy way to explain probability, I realized back in high school that D&D did give me a significantly better understanding of statistics than many of my peers who didn't play.
You hate your job? There's a support group for that. It's called "everybody" and they meet at the bar. -Drew Carey.
It's not for them to say 'coffee is good' or 'coffee is bad'. That's for you to determine.
It's antithetical to scientific thinking to draw conclusions that aren't relevant or supported by the results. It is, however, something journalists love to do for them.
But anyway, are you really unable to fathom the idea that something can be good in some ways and bad in others? And that something can be good under a certain set of circumstances and bad under another?
Besides which, coffee hasn't been shown to be particularly bad for you unless you have a heart condition and need to avoid caffeine for blood-pressure reasons. It also contains some carcinogens - which is one of those sources of journalistic misinterpretation, because there's a big difference between 'contains carcinogens' and 'causes cancer'. Just because something contains a carcinogen doesn't necessarily mean that carcinogen is potent enough and the concentration sufficient to substantially change the risks of cancer, in particular once you take into account how much actually gets taken up into the body.
(what's the opposite of coffee?)
Alcohol
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I cannot drink coffee or I get incredibly manic. I wonder if there is some kind of product that will give the same benefit without the caffiene (does this apply to decaf?)
There Can Be Only One...
D3 is actually more common than D4 - any 6 sided die can represent it.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Hey I rolled a nat 20 so you bitches can suck it!
I thought that the antioxidant hypothesis had pretty much been debunked. If you have a functioning pancreas and liver, you don't need to supplement what's in your diet.
And coffee doubling your chances if you drink more than 3 cups per day? I think the bad stats of the Relative Risk Increase is at work here. Let me see. Very very very low risk of something happening * 2 = still a very very very low risk of something happening.
Hard drugs.
Hard liquor.
Smoking.
Jumping off tall buildings.
Stepping out in front of a bus.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
His Alzheimers was to blame for that. He forgot how to brew coffee.
no, milk is produced to put into coffee--the opposite of coffee is probably alcohol or some such or maybe a fuzzy warm blanket... after all, it seems like the opposite of a liquid thing that makes you stay away should be something solid.
Its not just Slashdot that runs alternativing good-bad coffee stories in succession.
I'm addicted. At least I dont have to make up my mind.
A Christian friend of mine noted recently that there is a lot of hypocrisy about certain traditions--wanting to take his faith seriously but still comment on the absurdity of part of how some look at it, he wrote the following:
Coffee as a means of grace
In answer to the tradition of Christmas, I don't think many Christians would say that Christ was born on 25 December, rather that they wanted to celebrate his incarnation as a human and figured a midwinter date was as good as any (with about as much evidence for midwinter as any other time). It wasn't until marketing got a hold of it in the early 20th century that Christmas even became the important Christian holiday. Before that, a number of Christian holidays held roughly equal significance and some even more importance (e.g., Easter, whose rough date is known on the basis of lunar calendars).
In terms of "wanting to drink someone's blood," the celebration of the Lord' Supper / Eucharist is not the same from one Christian tradition to another with many taking it as a memorial / remembrance with others viewing it as an act of spiritual thanksgiving (hence the term "Eucharist" which means "thanksgiving"). The idea of blood sacrifice though is tied to it whether it is a memorial or a type of participation (real or otherwise)--part of Christianity is hard to swallow because today we don't want to think anything requires the ultimate price. All too often looking in the news, I think we try to avoid painful realities like death because they aren't comfortable.
Take it all for what it's worth, thanks for "reading" if you made it this far.
But anyway, are you really unable to fathom the idea that something can be good in some ways and bad in others?
What is this of which you speak?
This is /.
Windows is 100% evil.
Linux is 100% good.
The US Government is 100% evil.
RMS is 100% good.
There seems to be some disagreement about Java, however, where some say it's 100% evil, and some say it's 100% good.
Wait......Java.....coffee.....
Hey!!
I totally understand what you mean, now!
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
It didn't help my mother. She knocked back the coffee like a real pro. The operative words are "can reduce." I have a 50 50 chance of coming down with Alzheimer's. I'm doing what I can to protect myself, but I know "can reduce" means little compared to "will prevent."
photosMy Photostream
3F0011
De-Caf
When are these "experts" going to make up their freaking mind?!
In this case it seems they have for quite some time, and it's more the general public that still seems to think it's bad for you. From what I've seen, the consensus about coffee in the medical community is this: Within the limits (your own personal limits) of consumption that don't cause you to have bad side affects (digestive, insomnia, whatever), the more the better...period. While stuff like the affect on Alzheimer's may be theoretical, coffee is without question one of the best sources of antioxidants you'll find, and I've heard absolutely no evidence of any long term dangers of any degree of coffee consumption. Many (if not most) doctors these days won't even tell you not to drink more that x cups a day unless more than x cups a day causes problems for you...so even the usual "it's ok in moderation" thing doesn't necessarily apply.
Much like the belief that cold weather or "getting a chill" causes the common cold, I think it's more the general public that doesn't get it on this one.
Can't sleep. Clowns will eat me.
Have gnu, will travel.
"3 cups or more may cause hallucinations."
So, I am hallucinating that I am awake?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Now I'll be able to remember all of those awesome hallucinations I've been having!
Forget the hallucination stuff. Look at the spider web studies.
Various studies have been done giving drugs to spiders, and using their webs as evidence of the effects. My family doctor has a poster of these webs in his offices to show patients what these substances can do to you, and I think most people would be shocked at how extremely the spiders were affected by caffeine, which you can see in this photo.
My wife's mother has Alzheimer's, and she lives with us, so I'm acutely aware of what it does to people, and heavy doses of caffeine is definitely the lesser of two evils here. But it will still be nice to have a treatment that doesn't have it's own harsh side effects.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You forgot sex and rock and roll. Oh shit! You're already showing symptoms!
coffee is good for the brain. coffee causes hallucinations. peyote causes hallucinations. looks like I picked the wrong week to quit taking peyote!
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Wait what? Since when does D&D use d8s for saving throws? It's the same die, the coffee just gives you a +1 bonus to the roll.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
It sounds like your nutritionist was insane, and I wouldn't put ANY stock in what he said about caffine. First of all, that's just just one guy's opinion, and not someone who studies alzheimers or the effects of caffine. Second, although the coffee probably didn't help, the nutritionist told him not to worry about quitting smoking? You'd be hard pressed to find many professionals who would tell you that. The coffee likely didn't cause the emphysema, the years of smoking did. Lastly, the word of the nutritionist doesn't hold much water against the current study.
Except that I've never had any....from coffee anyway. I have been drinking at least 4 cups per day for the past 40 years and never had any adverse affects, it doesn't even keep me awake. Hell, at my age, I might actually welcome a hallucination or two. ;)
has it occurred to anyone that it may have nothing to do with chemical interactions at the level they're describing it? there's a fairly well known study with old nuns, where it was shown that active minds are less likely to get alzheimers. could it be that the stimulated brains of coffee drinkers is the real protective effect? if so, perhaps soda-fueled developers will also have lower rates of alzheimers.
> what's the opposite of coffee?
Ginger. Coffee is a basal vasoconstrictor, and ginger is a vasodilator.
So coffee lowers the blood flow to the brain, and ginger increases it. Don't take both at once unless you enjoy headaches.
conee?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But anyway, are you really unable to fathom the idea that something can be good in some ways and bad in others? And that something can be good under a certain set of circumstances and bad under another?
Heck, my thought on this whole subject is (mis)quoting a rather ancient philosopher -
Moderation in all things, including moderation.
Not many things in life are strictly linear. A glass of wine a day is good. A dozen, not so much. A little meat in your diet, good. Eating 6 pounds a day? Not good. Washing your hands is a good habit. Washing/scrubbing until you bleed? Not good. Sodium Chloride, salt, is essential for life, but too much is bad. So on and so forth...
I don't think it's that difficult. But then, people have signed dihydrogen monoxide bad petitions.
I don't read AC A human right
I'll be sure to let my dad know. I'm sure he'll be relieved.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I never drink coffee. I can't remember why though.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
So, it's true, then, is it? Coffee really is the drink of the gods? We've long known, of course, that chocolate is the food of the gods, so I guess that chocolate covered coffee beans are the most wonderful dish in the world?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I don't believe this for a second. I have seen many of my older family members that drank coffee all the time still get it.
Just my luck, I get my coffee in bags, not cans.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I can vouch for the dangers of too much caffeine.
I accidentally started drinking a lot more caffeine than usual, and after a while, I started having worse and worse tremors. My hands would shake. The day I went to see my doctor about it, I had to concentrate furiously to get my hand steady enough to sign my signature at the front desk.
We didn't know what was going on. I was certain it wasn't the coffee I was drinking, because coffee had never been a problem for me before. My doctor gave me some tests, and told me he was sure it wasn't anything scary (Parkinson's disease or something). He recommended I start taking magnesium supplements.
I took the magnesium and it helped right away! Then over time the tremors started to get worse again. I was starting to get scared.
My doctor sent me to a neurologist. I decided to cut out all coffee for a week or so before visiting the neurologist; I was still certain coffee wasn't the cause of my problems, but I figured it would be helpful to remove one variable from the equation. After being tested in various ways while hooked up to cool machines, I was ruled not to have anything scary. More importantly, after a week with no coffee, I was starting to feel a lot better.
So I decided to stay off the coffee. I had some bad withdrawal symptoms (headache, etc.) and took a lot of aspirin and ibuprofen. (And around this time I started to get bad tinnitus on top of everything else!)
Now I am mostly off caffeine. I sometimes have a single cup of caffeinated coffee. The tremors have passed and I'm grateful that my symptoms are gone. (The tinnitus stopped when I stopped taking the aspirin and ibuprofen.)
An important thing I want to tell you: I never drank a cup of coffee and then immediately had my hands start shaking. I had a gradual onset of hand tremors and it was chronic, with no obvious increase right after I drank coffee. This convinced me the tremors could not be caused by the coffee, but now I am convinced that they were.
You may be wondering how I could accidentally start overdosing on caffeine. Well, I started working in a building where the coffee was awful (Farmer Brothers commercial coffee service), so I started making my own coffee using an Aeropress. This is an excellent coffee maker (Dan likes it!), and I still use it and recommend it. But when I first got it, I was using caffeinated coffee, and I was trying to make "doppio ristretto" portions for myself, so I was using two scoops of finely ground espresso beans. I now believe that one AeroPress scoop of coffee makes a double shot, so I was effectively drinking four espresso shots worth of caffeine; and I usually drank two of these per day. So while I thought I was drinking 4 espresso shots worth of caffeine, I suspect I was drinking 8 shots worth, possibly even a little more.
As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison. I drank reasonable portions of caffeine for years and didn't notice any ill effects at all; it was only when I drank too much that I had the scary tremors.
If you get hand tremors, I do suggest you cut out all caffeine for a while and see if it helps.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
...And Starbucks.
Should I quit coffee or increase dosage???
Now what... smoking prevents glaucoma???
However, researchers warn against drinking too much coffee, as 3 cups or more may cause hallucinations.
Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion
Great science there, now for the 'control' portion of your experiment you just need another identical grandfather with the exception that that one didn't drink coffee.
I would venture to guess that he either would've been symptomatic earlier had he not drank the coffee, or he's one of the significant percentage who didn't show this effect. But either way, the existence of exceptions don't disprove anything, I wonder why people can't understand such a simple concept. The plural of anecdote is not data.
No, no. Believing that alzheimer's has been averted is simply one of the hallucinations.
Powdered water?
Perhaps we've solved Stephen Wright's problem!
no, that's the opposite of 0xc0ffee
coffee is ascii.
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
coffee found to increase risk of certain cancers. I give it a date of 2012. For those that doubt me you should know by now that pretty much everything gives you cancer.
In the tea section.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Don't take both at once unless you enjoy headaches.
I don't think that's true... :)
I eat sushi with green tea and fresh ginger. I don't think I've ever gotten a headache.
Now, when by buddy goes with me and we drink the big bottles of Asahi, that's a different story.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Virtually every coffee study I see never seems to distinguish between regular and decaff coffee. I'd prefer decaff with the same benefits otherwise.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm just wildly speculating here, but could the coffee and the Herpes Simplex virus be mixed into the Alzheimers pot here? Could the intake of caffeine reduce the effects of HSV-1 and HSV-2? Maybe Alzheimers could be treated by Lysine?
Task Mangler
I mostly drink decafe - would the potential health benefits remain the same, or is it caffeine that's the real benefit here?
Depends if you're talking to the experts paid by the coffee companies or the experts paid by the ... hum... tea companies? (what's the opposite of coffee?)
ffee?
(sine/cosine, tangent/cotangent, worker/coworker)
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Alejo
...damned if you don't, seems three cups is never enough for some of us:
Coffee Lowers Gout Risk
Coffee-Swilling Men Get Less Gout, Study Shows
By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News
Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD
May 25, 2007 - The more coffee men drink, the lower their risk of gout. At least four cups a day lower gout risk by 40%, a Canada/U.S. study shows.
Gout starts with a buildup of uric acid in the blood. This results in deposits of uric acid crystals in the joints and surrounding areas, causing swelling and intense pain.
The new study is based on data from nearly 46,000 male medical professionals enrolled in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Over 12 years, 757 of these men developed gout, report Hyon K. Choi, MD, DrPH, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and colleagues.
Because the men filled out detailed diet questionnaires, Choi's team was able to track the men's self-reported use of coffee and tea.
They found that the more coffee the men drank, the less likely they were to have gout.
Drinking one to three cups of coffee a day lowered gout risk by only 8%. But drinking four or five cups a day dropped gout risk by 40%. And true coffee addicts -- those who drank six cups a day or more -- had nearly a 60% lower risk of gout.
Caffeine, whether from coffee, tea, or both, was not related to gout risk. Tea, it turned out, did not decrease gout risk.
But decaffeinated coffee did have an effect, although it wasn't as large as the effect of the high-test brew. Men who drank one to three cups of decaf had a 33% lower risk of gout. Those who drank four cups of decaf a day -- or more -- had only a 27% lower gout risk.
It's not clear why coffee lowers gout risk. Choi and colleagues note that coffee is a major source of a strong antioxidant, phenol chlorogenic acid, that may affect gout risk.
"Our findings are most directly generalizable to men age 40 years and older (the most gout-prevalent population) with no history of gout," Choi and colleagues suggest.
It's not yet known whether women who drink coffee are at lower risk of gout.
The findings appear in the June 2007 issue of the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism.
SOURCE: Choi, H.K. Arthritis & Rheumatism, June 2007; vol 56: pp 2048-2054.
© 2007 WebMD Inc. All rights reserved.
Shamelessly pilfered from
http://www.emedicinehealth.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=81383&pf=3&page=1
(Sorry couldn't find the original source)
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
I always knew aluminium sprinkles did more than just taste good.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Not at all. Those are examples of orthogonal functions, not opposites. The opposite of right is left, not forward.
Oh god yes it is. I had a tin of chocolate covered coffee beans at christmas. It was like two christmases.