In a paper published in PLOS Medicine, researchers found that consuming coffee or tea might be associated with a reduced risk of dementia and stroke.
Chinese researchers at Tianjin Medical University studied more than 350,000 participants as part of the UK Biobank. The focus of the study was on healthy individuals who were between the ages of 50 and 74.
The participants were recruited between 2006 and 2010. They were instructed to self-report their consumption of coffee and tea, with a follow-up assessment having been scheduled in 2020.
“We used Cox proportional hazards models to estimate the associations between coffee/tea consumption and incident stroke and dementia, adjusting for sex, age, ethnicity, qualification, income, body mass index, physical activity, alcohol status, smoking status, diet pattern, consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, high-density lipoprotein, low-density lipoprotein, history of cancer, history of diabetes, history of cardiovascular arterial disease, and hypertension,” the authors of the study explained in PLOS.
According to researchers, close to 5,000 participants went on to develop dementia during the study, while about 10,000 had one stroke, at the minimum.
It was determined that consuming 2 to 3 cups of coffee or 3 to 5 cups of tea each day led to a lower risk of stroke or dementia among the participants.
“We found that coffee intake of 2 to 3 cups/d or tea intake of 3 to 5 cups/d or their combination intake of 4 to 6 cups/d were linked with the lowest hazard ratio (HR) of incident stroke and dementia,” the findings say.
“Drinking 2 to 3 cups of coffee with 2 to 3 cups of tea daily were associated with a 32% lower risk of stroke and a 28% lower risk of dementia.”
“These findings highlight a potential beneficial relationship between coffee and tea consumption and risk of stroke, dementia, and poststroke dementia, although causality cannot be inferred,” the authors inferred in their findings.
