Health Bytes

Tea and breast cancer

Women under 50 that are regular tea drinkers are less likely to develop breast cancer. However, tea offers no protection against the disease to older women, according to a report published in Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention.

The study, which was conducted by the Moffitt Cancer Centre in Tampa, Florida, looked at the medical histories and lifestyles 5,000 women aged between 20 and 74 who had been treated for breast cancer and compared those with a similar group of breast cancer-free women.

The results indicated that women under 50 who drink three cups or more a day were 37% less likely to have tumors than those that don't drink tea. The benefits were even greater when it came to 'lobular' breast cancer, which affects one in ten breast cancer sufferers, with tea reducing the risk by 66%.

'Regular tea consumption, particularly at moderately high levels, might reduce breast cancer risk in younger women.

"Given that tea is the most common beverage consumed in the world, it makes an attractive candidate for breast cancer prevention," the report said.

Tea and the brain

A joint Norwegian and UK study has demonstrated that drinking tea and wine and eating chocolate daily can lead to improved cognitive function in older people.

The researchers, from the University of Oxford's Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and the University of Oslo. were looking at links between cognitive brain function in older people and the intake of flavonoid-rich chocolate, wine and tea, the Journal of Nutrition reports.

They discovered that 70- to 74-year-olds consuming chocolate, wine or tea had "significantly better mean test scores and lower prevalence of poor cognitive performance" than a similar group that ate or drank no chocolate, tea or wine.

"We found that the effect was maximal with as little as a small glass of wine," said study co-author David Smith, a founding director of the Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Aging. The results did not tend to improve for those participants who consumed greater quantities of wine, tea or chocolate, and the researchers pointed out that test is observational and not clinical.

"More research would be needed to prove that it was flavonoids, rather than some other aspect of the foods studied, that made the difference," they said.

Coffee and oral cancer

The American Journal of Epidemiology has reported on Japanese research that indicates coffee drinkers are 50% less likely to develop oral cancers. The researchers studied data on 38,000 people aged 40 to 64 with no history of cancer over 13.

Even in people with high-risk behaviors such as smoking and drinking one or more cups of coffee a day showed benefits.

"Caffeine has been suggested to suppress the progression of tumor cells," said Toru Naganuma, senior study author and an epidemiological researcher at Japan's Tohoku University.

Coffee and Dementia

If you are middle-aged, drinking three to five cups of coffee a day may help to prevent or delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer's disease by up to 70%, according to Scandinavian researchers from the University of Kuopio, Finland and the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden reported in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

The researchers compared the records of 1,409 people between the ages of 65 and 79 in Finland and Sweden, comparing them to a series of surveys in 1972, 1977, 1982 and 1987 that they had previously participated in that noted daily coffee consumption.

According to the report, over an average of 21 years, subjects drinking three or more cups of coffee during middle-age were far likely to have developed dementia or Alzheimer's. The study showed that coffee drinkers at midlife had a lower risk for dementia or Alzheimer's. The lowest risk was found among moderate coffee drinkers (65%-70% decreased risk of dementia and a 62%-64% decreased risk of Alzheimer's) compared with low coffee drinkers (zero to two cups daily).

"Given the large amount of coffee consumption globally, the results might have important implications for the prevention of or delaying the onset of dementia/Alzheimer's disease, said researcher Miia Kivipelto. "The finding needs to be confirmed by other studies, but it opens the possibility that dietary interventions could modify the risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. [And it] might help in the development of new therapies for these diseases."

Previous studies have indicated coffee improves memory and that caffeine reportedly reduces the risk of Parkinson's disease.

"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," said Kivipelto. The pathologic processes leading to Alzheimer's disease may start decades before the clinical manifestation of the disease."

Tea drinkers, however, did not show the same benefits, according to the researchers.

Coffee and Hallucinations

Psychologists at Durham University, UK, claim that consuming the 315 mg caffeine daily, or equivalent caffeine content of three cups of brewed coffee, can increase the chances of hallucinating by three times. 200 non-smoking students were quizzed about their total daily caffeine intake in the study.

A small number of subjects claimed to have experienced visual and aural hallucinations, and one claimed to be able to "sense the dead."

One can only wonder what they are putting in their coffee at Durham University