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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."
will work just as well?
If so, why am I so forgetful? I drink two or three cups of tea a day.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
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Apples have the same effect if I remember right, and without the giant list of negative effects coffee/caffeine have.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
Nothing is guaranteed in life; if I tell you that drinking coffee reduces your chance of getting Alzheimer's by 90%, that does not mean that you will definitely not get Alzheimer's if you drink coffee. This is not math, where a single counterexample is sufficient.
Palm trees and 8
Or necessarily false either. Had she not been drinking coffee, the onset might have started a decade earlier.
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i guess i just have to hope i don't forget where i put my coffee cup....
i think the study used real coffee. not the crap like Folgers which is 1/3 tree bark and full of crazy chemicals to hide the crappy taste
Besides correlation != causation, did they actually determine that those individuals with reduced Alzheimer's risk were actually consuming more caffeine? Higher blood caffeine levels does not necessarily indicate higher caffeine intake, any more than a person with high blood alcohol levels - who happens have to have slow alcohol metabolism - can be said to be drinking more alcohol than others.
Maybe coffee drinkers are correlated with something else that prevents Alzheimer's. I see no mention in the article that this is more than statistical correlation they have found.
Doing a controlled experiment where the only dietetic difference is the coffee is near impossible due to the cost.
Typical conclusion section speculation from a correlation study IMHO.
I think it would be dangerous for people to drinking coffee assuming they are warding off Alzheimer's. Coffee has know to have bad effects on the body. It is a diuretic and a stimulant.
Who are you, why are you here?
Sure caffeine possibly could, by itself, prevent Alzheimers.
But I would say a far more likely reason for the correlation is the correlation between drinking a good amount of coffee and being active and exercising your brain on a daily basis.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
People who drink coffee might be doing it at work, which keeps you alert and prevents dementia.
Depends on where one works. At some companies, dementia seems to be a prerequisite for employment.
Have gnu, will travel.
She made it to her eighties? My grandfather died of Alzheimer at a much younger age which means I am at risk. If I can keep it at bay until I am eighty I will be quite pleased!
love is just extroverted narcissism
Recently I have seen all these reoccurring stories about how coffee prevents a slew of different forms of cancer, specifically prostate and colon, so I have taken to giving myself hot coffee enemas (3 cups per the articles recommendations) every morning. So now based on this speculative and partial study I am concerned if this is enough, should I continue on my current path or start a coffee IV drip instead?
... SMBC ;)
Had you for a second there, didn't I?
It's not that caffeine prevents Alzheimer's, caffeine dilates time itself. We live a lifetime of productive bliss in only a few moments. Why else do non-coffee drinkers never appear to age? In what feels like 60 years for us, only a short time passes for them. They look younger because they are younger. But, they also live long enough to get Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer. In a twist of irony our lives are shorter but our years are longer. We looked to the internet for the Singularity, but we should have looked inside. The Singularity is us.
My grandfather, major coffee drinker, died from Alzheimers.
And despite the coffee I consume, I'm already noticing my memory slipping and fading. Of course it doesn't help I was already dead twice back in 2007.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
With these studies, it's very important to know WHO finances them, because this fact has an overwhelming influence onto the results. I was looking here:
http://www.patrickholford.com/index.php/blog/blogarticle/1184/
and found this text:
Coffee and Alzheimer’s
There’s no doubt that coffee raises homocysteine levels, which are strongly associated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
A group of doctors from the University Hospital Nijmegen tested the effects of coffee by assigning volunteers to drink a litre of unfiltered coffee a day – that’s about four cups – for two weeks. At the start of the two weeks their average H score was 12.8 M, slightly above the national average of 10 to 11. At the end of the two weeks their H score was 14.
A study by Dr Verhoef and co. at the Wageningen Centre for Food Sciences in the Netherlands showed that two cups of regular coffee increased homocysteine by 11% after only four hours, while caffeine tablets without coffee increased it by 5%.
However, whether coffee drinking actually increases Alzheimer’s risk is not yet clear. There are study pointing both ways.
In summary, the research does suggest that, if you are going to drink coffee it is best to do it on its own, without either a sweetener or carb snack, then wait at least 30 minutes before eating. Also, it is best to not overdo it having perhaps one or two coffees at most. More than this is likely to make your more stressed and agitated Almost all the benefits of coffee are also reported for decaf, which eliminates a fair amount of the downsides. So, a decaf a day may actually help rather than hinder your health as far as diabetes and blood sugar control is concerned.
Now, who can prove me which one is right? :-).
My beloved granddad drank at the peak probably 1-2 carafes of coffee a day single handed. He was a trucker in his younger years and after that built fence for 10 years or so, and he loved his coffee. (In fact, he started me out drinking it at age 7 - great memories). Anyway, I can't be sure what caused his mind to go there 3-4 years before he passed, but it was one of two things - low blood oxygen levels and low bloodflow to the brain because of his past heart issues, or it could've been Alzheimer's.
If this turns out to be true it'd affirm that his heart, not Alzheimer's caused his dementia.
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then I might forget the next morning's cup, then I'm totally screwed.
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Another study will come out soon that says that observational studies sometimes produce erroneous and/or conflicting results.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I bet if people drink lots of Coca Cola everyday the odds of them getting Alzheimer's go way down. The higher the dose the stronger the effect.
Even reduces the odds of dying of cancer.
Not to mention reducing the odds of death from auto collision, gunshot, malaria, HIV, ...
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Emoticon usage panels have agreed in majority that the simple smiley emoticon to indicate archness or conspiratorial irony is unacceptable. The overwhelming vote for appropriate emoticon to indicate these things is the winky. ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rea-yBgOSo It's not creepy at all, honest?
Please keep in mind this study only found a correlation between the two, not a direct causational outcome. It should be interesting to see what further studies show researchers about the effects of coffee or caffeine. This doesn't mean that guzzling coffee for the rest of your life will keep you 100% clear of Alzheimer's, however.
Roasted coffee starts to get stale after about a week. And is at its peak about 24 hours after roasting. Only a very few coffee houses consistently serve freshly roasted specialty coffee. (Places that serve Counter Culture coffee do a pretty good job.) Vacuum packing roasted coffee does not prevent the deterioration (It helps a bit, but then the coffee stales almost immediately after exposure to air.) Nor does freezing help either.
The darker roasts served up by the mass market coffee houses are actually eschewed by real coffee geeks, who prefer to roast their own and to a lighter degree. And, in any case, the dark roasted beans at these joints are usually stale anyway. Dude. Once you have tasted, say, a freshly roasted Yirgacheffe from Ethiopia, or a great Kenyan AA you will not say "ick". And here is another fact. Green coffee lasts for two years. And is roughly half the price per pound as roasted coffee. Which is why I roast my own coffee in a home roasting appliance. (I use a Nesco). I make about a third of a pound at a time, It is wonderful. Rarely in life is cheaper better. But in this case it is true (Except for the energy involved in roasting of course.) The fact is that coffee, like bread, is just better when it is fresh. A lot better.
With care coffee can be roasted on the stove top in a black cast iron pan. It smokes a lot so you should have a venting hood. There are tons of on-line instructions. To get my beans I go to Sweet Maria's or to Burman Coffee traders. But there are many places to get green beans. Equipment is available from these places I mentioned as well.
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Actually, there have been publications that MOST observational studies produce erroneous results. My thinking is that this means that an arbitrary statement is MORE likely to be true if it has no scientific backing at all, than if it is backed by a peer-reviewed observational study.
The main issue is that you can keep testing hypothesis until you find something that sticks and never report negative results. That is no different than doing a survey, throwing out all the answers you don't like, and then reporting the results has having unanimous support.
The other name for this is "Caffeine Allergy". For a very, very small amount of people (that 1% your talking about), caffeine has quite a psychotic effect on the brain. Some details can be found here: http://doctoryourself.com/caffeine_allergy.html . In my case, it makes me talk at inappropriate times, makes me overly critical of people and (at times) makes me very very angry at people for no valid good reason. I also have been very fearful of things in general, generally anti-social and had some OCD characteristics thrown in to boot. Borderline hoarder.
This allergy appears to be genetic, since my father and grandfather both exhibited the same traits.
Since discovering what was ailing me, I have slowly decreased my caffeine intake. I drink Diet Coke and am now down to 12 oz per day. I want to decrease that even further, but at least at 12 oz my brain has a chance of functioning normally. The allergy hit (as far as I can tell) around age 16-17. I'm 47 now and am just now coming to terms with it and how it's affected my life over the last 30 years.
Oh well, at least I discovered it. Most of my family did not.
Thank you for putting up with my post, Gordon (post AC because I haven't signed up yet)
Yeah, well, my great uncle started smoking at age 12 and quit at age 82, and lived another decade. But I wouldn't suggest that his longevity disproves the fact that smoking is bad for you.
Were it not for the coffee, your granny might well have shown symptoms earlier and been dead by now.
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So what the fuck will that have to do with this study?
Seriously, you want the scientists to tell you what is "good" and what is "bad"? You don't want the scientists to publish their results, and show evidence that some things may have a positive or negative effect?
You comment makes as much sense as someone complaining that the radiotherapy their mother received didn't cure her alzheimer's.
gah... The web always conspires against me.
If it is caffeine, then I guess you could conceivably get the same benefit from chocolate
Chocolate ?
Hell, no, I want my JOLT COLA NOW !!
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Didn't prevent it in my dad.
the first thing to go is the memory. I forget what the 2nd thing is.
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