Would You Like Prozac With Your Latte?

The Guardian recently published this story about a longitudinal Harvard study of 51,000 female coffee drinkers followed over ten years. They found that there was a 20% lower risk of clinical depression in the women who drank four or more cups of coffee a day compared to non-drinkers. This is consistent with a previous study of 86,000 female nurses followed over ten years, where they found that the relative risk of suicide was reduced even for moderate to low coffee drinkers, defined as drinking two or three cups per day.

This is good news for me since I usually start my day with a half a pot before I get to work. (Yes, that much, really. No wonder Dinah sent me a link to this story and said, "You've gotta blog about this.")

The trick is, there may be a ceiling effect to all this: once you get to eight or more cups a day this risk of suicide starts to increase again according to one study.

Somewhat gratuitously, the Guardian article threw in reference to our "druggy society" and faulted the researchers for not considering other factors like social supports, involvement in religious groups or community activities, and even whether the women were drinking coffee alone or with friends:

"As the scientists will also tell you, neurotransmitters respond to everything: hugs, kisses, conversation, books, pictures, gardening, hunger, worry, rows, war – all raise or lower chemical levels."

Ah yes, clinical depression and suicide must be the result of not getting enough hugs or the fact that you haven't taken up gardening. Cringe-worthy health reporting, at its best. The reporter concludes:

"...supposedly scientific comments of this sort serve little purpose except to coax women into a state the doctors can then medicate."

Amazing. A simple study about caffeine and depression has somehow been morphed into another nefarous plot by evil Dr. Pillshrink.

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We have a new post up on our Psychology Today blog. A bit more of the same, but check it out if you can stand it.

Okay, so here's the real post in honor of ClinkShrink, our caffeine addict.
It's a century since Coca-Cola went on trial for sticking that caffeine stuff in their drink. 80mg, back then. There was a trial, there was research, and here's the article in today's New York Times: A Century Later, Jury's Still Out on Caffeine Limits and Murray Carpenter writes:

Coca-Cola hired a Barnard College psychology instructor named Harry Levi Hollingworth. He mustered 16 subjects aged 19 to 39, including occasional, moderate and regular caffeine users, along with abstainers. In a Manhattan apartment rented for the research, he tested their mental and motor skills under varying levels of caffeine use and abstinence. They took caffeine capsules and placebos — double blinded, so neither they nor the researcher knew which was which — and “soda fountain” drinks with and without caffeine. The trial looming, Hollingworth did it all in just 40 days.

The subjects kept good notes. On Feb. 22, a regular user was caffeine-free: “Felt like a ‘bone head’ all day. My head was dull more than usual.” On Feb. 25, an abstainer was dosed with four grains of caffeine (260 milligrams, the approximate equivalent of a 12-ounce cup of Starbucks coffee): “Gradual rise of spirits till 4:00. Then a period of exuberance, of good feeling. Fanciful ideas rampant.”

Hollingworth found that moderate doses of caffeine stimulated his subjects’ performance on an array of tests, though some slept poorly after the highest doses. His appearance on March 27, 1911, was a high point in a four-week trial dominated by anecdotal, contradictory or sloppy testimony.

The point of the article? 100 years later and we're still asking all the same questions. Go figure.