Coffee Consumption Strongly Linked To Preventing Alzheimer's

An anonymous reader writes "Those cups of coffee that you drink every day to keep alert appear to have an extra perk — especially if you're an older adult. A recent study monitoring the memory and thinking processes of people older than 65 found that all those with higher blood caffeine levels avoided the onset of Alzheimer's disease in the two-to-four years of study follow-up. Moreover, coffee appeared to be the major or only source of caffeine for these individuals."

Comments

Small Sample?

[Anonymous Coward]

124 people in the study is pathetic. Why wouldn't they get a bigger sample size for a study like this? Not like it should be difficult. Apparently a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine included over 400,000 older adults in similar study.

Re:Small Sample?

[jpate]

Yeah! There's no way that trained scientists would be able to calculate reliable a difference is given a certain sample size with an observed variance! That's just wayyyy too hard. The only way to do real science is to get 400,000 data points for every comparison; it's the only way to be sure.

In all seriousness, huge sample sizes are only important if we are comparing several variables, where a large sample size can give us good estimates for rare combinations of events, and/or small effects, where a large sample size allows us to achieve small confidence intervals over the relevant comparisons. It's quite possible for a sample size of 124 to yield a significant difference for one effect if the effect is of at least moderate size.

Re:So, I suspect that a good strong cup of tea ...

[arth1]

Honestly, as long as the point comes across you shouldn't really care.

But it didn't come across. I was about to google "florine" to find out what I had missed when I saw the GN's post. Because I'm not a phonetic reader, it never occurred to me that florine might be fluorine.

The devil is in the details. Being imprecise not only sends someone on a wild goose chase, but also means no distinction between fluorine, fluorene and fluoride, all of which are quite different things. And it's not fluorine that's thought to be a problem, but fluoride compounds, specifically hydrogen fluoride. It's as wrong as saying oxygen when you mean ozone.

Re:So, I suspect that a good strong cup of tea ...

[icebrain]

What's that whooshing sound?

(Ok, I'll explain it... drinking lots of Coke every day does increase cholesterol and lead to obesity and such... and increasing your chances of dying early before Alzheimer's kicks in. So yes, the odds of dying from Alzheimer's go down, because you're much more likely do die earlier from something else.)