Moderate coffee drinking may reduce risk of Alzheimer's

New York, United States, January 19: Drinking moderate amounts of coffee may significantly reduce middle-aged people’s risk of developing Alzheimer's disease later in life, a study by Finnish and Swedish researchers suggested Thursday.

The research, published in the January issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, shows that those people who drink coffee in moderate amounts during middle age have a lower risk for late-onset dementia and Alzheimer's disease compared to those who drink little or no coffee.

To reach their findings, experts in Finland and Sweden examined the records of 1,409 Finnish people whose coffee drinking habits had been recorded when they were at midlife.

Conducted in collaboration with the National Public Health Institute in Helsinki, the study focused on repeated interviews with the study subjects over more than 20 years. All the study subjects were split into three groups: low coffee drinkers (zero to two cups per day), moderate coffee drinkers (three to five cups per day), and high coffee drinkers (more than five cups per day).

The researchers’ team first asked the study participants about their coffee-drinking habits and memory function when they were in their 50s and then tested them again in 1998 when they were between the ages of 65 and 79.

After an average of 21 years, a total of 61 developed dementia, 48 of whom developed Alzheimer’s.

The researchers noticed that coffee drinkers at midlife had a lower risk for dementia or Alzheimer's later in life than those who consumed little or no coffee at midlife.

Moderate coffee drinkers had a 65-70 percent decreased risk of dementia and a 62-64 percent decreased risk of Alzheimer's compared with low coffee drinkers, the researchers said.

"Middle-aged people who drank between three and five cups of coffee a day lowered their risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer's disease by between 60 and 65 percent later in life," said lead researcher Miia Kivipelto, a professor at the University of Kuopio in Finland and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

"There are perhaps one or two other studies that have shown that coffee can improve some memory functions (but) this is the first study directed at dementia and Alzheimer's (and) in which the subjects are followed for such a long time," Kivipelto added.

Kivipelto said it is still ambiguous that exactly how or why moderate coffee drinking helped delay or avoid the onset of memory-robbing illness, but according to her, coffee contains strong antioxidantsdefine, which are known to counter Alzheimer's.

She said, "We aimed to study the association between coffee and tea consumption at midlife and dementia/AD risk in late life because the long-term impact of caffeine in the central nervous system was still unknown, and ... the pathologic processes leading to Alzheimer's disease may start decades before the clinical manifestation of the disease."

Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the development of unusual clumps of proteins called amyloid plaques and nerve cell tangles that hinder messages being processed by the brain. AD that destroys patients' memories and capacity for speech affects an estimated 5.2 million Americans.

Alzheimer's affects almost half of all patients with dementia. The most striking early symptom of Alzheimer’s is loss of short term memory. As the disorder progresses, cognitive injury extends to the domains of language (aphasia), skilled movements (apraxia), recognition (agnosia), and those functions (such as decision-making and planning) closely related to the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain.

As per the estimates of a report, titled “2008 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures,” one in eight baby boomers will likely develop Alzheimer’s disease as they get older, putting more strains on the U.S. health-care system and researchers who have been trying hard to formulate various methods to prevent the memory-robbing illness.

According to statistics, there are about 24 million people with dementia worldwide, and it has been projected that by 2040, the number of people suffering from AD will increase to 81 million. Globally, there are about 60 percent people in the developing countries affected by Alzheimer’s and by 2040, this proportion will rise to 71 percent.