A new study from researchers at King’s College London found that people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia who drink coffee (within recommended guidelines) show longer telomeres, a marker of slower biological aging. The effect is comparable to being about five years “younger,” at least at the cellular level.
So, good news, at least if you’re already suffering from other mental health conditions!
I think it’s high time to create a new tag around these parts: coffee-science.
Add this to my coffee confusion post from last year. A new study published in the European Heart Journal concludes that greater coffee intake (in the morning) was “significantly associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality.”
Hey, that’s pretty cool!
From the journal article:
In their study published in this issue of the European Heart Journal, Wang et al.8 analysed the time of the day when coffee is consumed in 40 725 adults from the NHANES and of 1463 adults from the Women’s and Men’s Lifestyle Validation Study. They noticed two distinct patterns of coffee drinking, i.e. the morning-type pattern, present in around a third of participants, and a less common all-day-type pattern present in 14% of the participants. During a median follow-up of almost a decade, and after adjustment for caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee intake, the amounts of cups per day, sleep hours, and other confounders, the morning-type, rather than the all-day-type pattern, was significantly associated with lower risks of all-cause mortality with a hazard ratio of 0.84 and of cardiovascular mortality of even 0.69 as compared with non-coffee drinkers.
One of the most striking findings is that coffee drinkers are less prone to developing Type 2 diabetes. Many large studies have found that people who drink three to four cups of coffee daily have about a 25 percent lower risk of the disease compared with people who drink little or no coffee. Your likelihood of developing diabetes decreases about 6 percent for each cup of coffee you consume daily — but only up to about six cups.
Caffeine intoxication occurs when a person has dangerously high levels of caffeine in the system. It creates a spectrum of unpleasant and severe symptoms, such as trouble breathing and seizures. There are a few cases where people have died from caffeine intoxication.
[…]
Caffeine intoxication is more than the headache you get from drinking too much expresso. It happens when people ingest an excessive amount of caffeine. The US Food and Drug Administration defines this limit as anything more than 400 milligrams of caffeine daily for healthy adults. This is equivalent to four or five cups of coffee.