Scientific American reports on a study by INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research in Montpellier, France, published recently in the journal
Neurology. They studied 7000 older people over four years, and found that higher coffee consumption was associated with less decline in memory over time for women over 65. Interestingly, there was no difference in rate of dementia, and there was no difference for men.
When I read the full study, there was one strange omission: there was no information about whether the baseline level of memory performance was any different between the coffee drinkers and the non-coffee drinkers. Maybe the coffee drinkers already killed most of their brain cells, and there wasn't much room left for decline, and that's why they showed less decline. Yes, that sounds silly on the face of it, but it seems like such an obviously relevant piece of information that I can't imagine why they left it out.
So there's an interesting bit of substance-news, and also yet another object lesson in careful interpretation of scientific publications...
