Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

High coffee consumption, brain volume and risk of dementia and stroke

tandfonline.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 142 posts

Re: High coffee consumption, brain volume and risk of dementia and stroke

#31

Post by lawlessone »

llamaLord wrote: post #6
nabla9 wrote: post #2

The article is not claiming causal link, but this is still interesting. >After full covariate adjustment, consumption of >6 cups/day was associated with 53% higher odds of dementia compared to consumption of 1–2 cups/day Coffee is stimulant just like some Alzheimer medications used to treat symptoms. It would be interesting to see if people increase coffee consumption with cognitive decline.

Considering the very early effects of dementia start to impact people sometimes decades before it becomes bad enough that they are diagnosed, it's certainly possible that extreme coffee consumption is some kind of self-medication mechanism. Anecdotally, I've seen this a lot with adults with undiagnosed ADHD (including myself until 26). Caffeine can be a (very shitty) alternative to proper stimulant medication that pe…

>alternative to proper stimulant medication

Nicotine will do it too.

Nicotine is a lot harder to stop though.

Re: High coffee consumption, brain volume and risk of dementia and stroke

#33

Post by jxy »

I can't access the article. Can somebody tell me what is "a cup" mentioned in the article? How much water and how much caffeine is in one "cup" in this article?

All the comments here mentions different number of "cups", but I'm very worried that all are different "cups"

Re: High coffee consumption, brain volume and risk of dementia and stroke

#35

Post by drtournier »

Coffee and tobacco consumption is a known correlation (one of many refs https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4158991/). Curious to see if authors considered that, as tobacco is one of the main aggressors of vascular tissue, which causes dementia in the long run.

EDIT 1: Just in time, UK Biobank (almost 500.000 people) study pointing to increased longevity with coffee consumers, an interesting controversy that just doesn't fit with their smaller study conclusion (although overall longevity is a different outcome, you would expect to find more dementia in older people) https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/coffee-lo...

Re: High coffee consumption, brain volume and risk of dementia and stroke

#37

Post by zdragnar »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #18
op00to wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s like a little more than 2 venti Starbucks.

> more than 2 venti Americans will do anything to not use the metric system :)

Venti is the Starbucks name for their largest size cup, which holds 20 ounces.

Most people don't really care about the exact, specific volume of fluid, they just go by whatever the cup size happens to be called.

At least it is more descriptive than the grande or short cups, or the small / medium / large at other places (even if you have to know that venti is 20 in Italian to make the connection).

Re: High coffee consumption, brain volume and risk of dementia and stroke

#40

Post by JonChesterfield »

xcv123 wrote: post #21
doubled112 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps someday we'll discover a coffee tolerance gene.

The gene is called CYP1A2 with two variants. One variant is a rapid caffeine metabolizer. The other is a slow caffeine metabolizer. https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/liver-detox-genes-cyp1a2/ I have the rapid variant but could not sleep well on 6 cups.

That is interesting information. I note that the same enzyme breaks down melatonin. If a variant that is particularly efficient at caffeine is also particularly efficient at breaking down melatonin, the symptom would be difficulty getting to sleep independent of amount of caffeine, which is totally fixed by taking melatonin tablets.
Post reply on HN