Caffeine May Protect Women's Brains, but Guys Are Out of Luck

Women who drink three cups of coffee a day show less cognitive decline than women who drink a cup or less, report French neuroscientists.

My first impulse was to attribute the findings with a correlation between coffee-drinking and intelligence: if you're going to be a witty, sardonic older intellectual, you're bound by cultural contract to drink lots of coffee, too. Especially if you're French.

But even after controlling for education and other variables, the findings -- which involved 7,000 women
-- held up. How does it work? Not clear. But given how hard it is to treat cognitive decline, any news of a way to slow or prevent it is welcome. Study author Karen Ritchie of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research was careful not to counsel indiscriminate coffee consumption just yet, but seemed optimistic:

"While we have some ideas as to how this works biologically, we need to have a better understanding of how caffeine affects the brain before we can start promoting caffeine intake as a way to reduce cognitive decline. But the results are interesting – caffeine use is already widespread and it has fewer side effects than other treatments for cognitive decline, and it requires a relatively small amount for a beneficial effect.” [...]

Caffeine consumers did not seem to have lower rates of dementia. “We really need a longer study to look at whether caffeine prevents dementia; it might be that caffeine could slow the dementia process rather than preventing it,” said Ritchie.

But guys are, sadly, out of luck: perhaps because of metabolic or physiological differences, the protective effects weren't found in men.

That hints at a sci-fi possibility I've sometimes entertained, most recently with reports of parthenogenetically derived stem cells: what if a therapy was developed that had radical benefits for health, but was only available to one gender?
In Women, Caffeine May Protect Memory [press release]

The neuroprotective effects of caffeine [Neurology]
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Image: Al-Fassan*