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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.
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Truly, drugs are nature's hugs.(and parasitic filarial nematodes are nature's psycho abusive stepparents...)
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.
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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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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
Maybe people with Alzheimer's forget where they left their coffee and never drink it.
... 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.
Bypass blood/brain barrier and just inject coffee directly to brain!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
FTFA
"“We found that 100 percent of the MCI patients with plasma caffeine levels above the critical level experienced no conversion to Alzheimer’s disease during the two-to-four year follow-up period,” said study co-author Dr. Gary Arendash."
100% is a extremely strong correlation....
love is just extroverted narcissism
And my grandfather recently died at the age of 103, after a lifetime of smoking, drinking, getting hardly any exercise, and eating crappy food. None of which means that these are recommended practices for extending your lifespan. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
What are the giant list of negative effects, exactly? The wiki doesn't seem to show more than a few Aside from the high blood pressure stuff (which kicks in with more than the study's amount of coffee), everything else is either benign or a reason people drink it in the first place (it keeps you awake)
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Interesting. The brain is quite powerful, specifically with regards to psychosomatic issues. As a kid, I used to love kettle popcorn, but I ate too much of it and it ... well, let's just say that it was sharp on the other side and I was in agony for a few days. Since then, even the thought of kettle corn makes me quite nauseous. I tried to eat some a few weeks later and it made me so sick I couldn't leave the house. I'd throw up if I tried to stand.
It was all in my head, of course. The intensely bad experience spoiled it for me, and my brain made my body react very strongly to it. There wasn't anything about the popcorn that had changed. Even though I know now that it's all in my head, I still can't eat the stuff.
Perhaps that's what happened to you? It explains the Red Bull situation.
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They didn't do a random test, say "oh hey look coffee did something lets make wild conclusions". They worked from mice studies, the most recent in 2006, then specifically did a human test by taking people with minor cognitive impairment (which often progresses into Alzheimer's), they tested them for their blood caffeine levels, and looked for further cognitive decline. What they found was that in mice with Alzheimer's, coffee prevented further mental decline. And, in those mice, there was a specific and identifiable immune response connected with this effect. What they also found was that decaff coffee produced neither the protective effect, nor the correlated immune response. And caffeine alone or from other sources did not have this effect, either. This new 4 year study took patients and looked at their blood caffeine levels, and found that those who drink a lot of coffee had the SAME identifiable immune response as the mice did, and that this immune response is also strongly correlated with protecting from further mental decline in humans.
So, if you weren't paying attention, this isn't a correlation study, that isn't "conclusion section speculation". There's an identifiable response, they know this identifiable response doesn't occur with decaff, or with non-coffee caffeine sources, so they conclude it is some combination of caffeine with some unknown agent in coffee. But the actual response is identified. The correlation is not between coffee and Alzheimer's per se, but between Alzheimer's and this specific immune response that is almost certainly triggered by coffee, because although it's hard to do a controlled experiment with people, it's not hard to do with mice! And they did. Six years ago.
At any rate, what they don't know is what other chemical is causing this, how this response is protecting against cognitive decline, and if having smaller amounts of coffee will have a lesser effect, or be just plain ineffective. (Some people have quoted 3 cups of coffee per day, but TFA says 3 cups of coffee shortly before being tested, which would indicate a lot more than 3 cups per day total)
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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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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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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