Posts Tagged ‘coffee’

If your daily routine includes perusing the same websites and you use Mozilla’s Firefox browser, there’s a great addon for you called Morning Coffee.

Morning Coffee appears as a button on your toolbar. You configure it by adding the urls of the websites you check each day. Once it’s set up, click the Morning Coffee button and the sites will automatically open in separate tabs. You can even configure different websites for different days of the week.

You can download Morning Coffee 1.33 here.

According to Gary Arendash, a researcher at the Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute in Tampa, Florida, giving Alzheimer’s mice the human equivalent of five cups of coffee, or 500 milligrams of caffeine, a day has plaque-busting effects and reverses symptoms of impaired memory in aging Alzheimer’s mice.

Arendash presented data that shows caffeine can reduce levels of two enzymes that play a role in the complex process of amyloid plaque formation.

“I don’t know of any drug under development that can address and suppress both of these enzymes,” Arendash said.

If preventing Alzheimer’s is as easy as drinking coffee, why do so many elderly Americans develop the disease? Arendash says the average American drinks only 150 milligrams of coffee a day and reduces intake with age.

Arendash’s institute has recently started clinical trials to determine if coffee will also prevent or treat Alzheimer’s in people.

“Caffeine could be a surprisingly effective treatment against this disease,” Arendash said. “It’s almost too good to be true.”

Source: Bloomberg

OnMedica News reports that a study in the journal Cancer suggests that drinking more coffee and team may prevent the development of ovarian cancer, especially in the absence of oral contraceptive or hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

The findings follow on from the publication this week of research showing that high caffeine consumption can double the risk of miscarriage (see Researchers: Caffiene may double risk of miscarriage).

The the health and dietary habits of over 110,000 women were tracked as part of the long-term US Nurses Health Study.

The results of the study showed that there did not seem to be any association with smoking―either current or past but caffeine intake seemed to be protective. Those drinking the most caffeine, including tea, every day were 20% less likely to develop the disease than those drinking the least.

You can read the entire article here.

A study recently published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, shows that women who drank four or more cups of coffee a day reduced their risk of stroke by 20% as compared to women who had less than one cup of coffee per month. Drinking two to three cups per day reduced risk by 19%. Drinking a cup five to seven times a week reduced risk by 12%.

Read the American Heart Association News Release here.