This is perplexing - Coffee's effectiveness on Parkinson prevention

[pdpatient]

I drank a lot of coffee from my teens until diagnosis at age 48. Yet study after study appears to support the efficacy of coffee in Parkinsons prevention.

neurosciencenews.com/caffei...

[Gymsack]

I think it has to be Starbucks🤑

[pdpatient in reply to Gymsack]

Maybe, my definition of "a lot" isn't good enough. Maybe, I should have drank "tons" 🤔

[Daisies22 in reply to pdpatient]

I love coffee (not Starbucks) and just like you I was diagnosed with Parkinson's at the age of 48. Perhaps I should have taken up smoking as apparently this would have lowered my chances of getting PD.

[EnterTheDragon in reply to Gymsack]

I drank “tons” of Tim Hortons coffee, then Starbucks. Didn’t make any difference in getting PD. Ha!

[Boscoejean]

have you ever noticed how it seems like every one of these correlations between one thing and another seem to have some exceptions? So often people say you need to change your diet. Well my husband has eaten healthy his whole life yet he still has Parkinson's and Dupuytren's . So maybe the fact that some habits would actually damage your organs or circulatory system like heavy drinking and smoking are likely ill advised but then you see people who live to be over a hundred and they say they have a drink every day. Maybe there is more to it than personal habits like exposures to toxins. My mom is no longer alive but I have noticed that a lot of her friends have lived well into their 90s and I started to think that maybe this is partly because there was less exposure to some kinds of toxins when they were young

[Ed-shakes]

same with exercise, obviously it helps so I’m not denying that. But how come athletes of all type do get PD and PD continue to progress even after their best efforts 🤔

[park_bear]

More on the subject of coffee and Parkinson's here:

healthunlocked.com/cure-par...

Also it is well to remember that these sorts of studies find associations which do not prove causation.

[CuriousMe12]

Who said 'genetics loaded the gun and environment pulled the trigger'. Add to this there are likely many factors under the genetics and environment banners.

[Xenos]

lowered risk of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) for individuals with Asian gene variants linked to the disorder

I bet you are not Asian...

[MarionP]

One of the things about coffee is that mixing it with any kind of proteins from milk completely spoils any potential effect from the antioxidants. It has to be black or with sugar but no milk cream whipped cream anything dairy. Creamer without protein, if it can be reliably established by things such as non-dairy creamers, almond milk, and like that are fine. It was a nasty lesson for me, who had always had milk and cream to the max, con leche as they say, latte as they say, screwed up the potential benefit except for whatever is bestowed by caffeine. The same thing happens with tea and that was another shock because I had wasted about 40 years doing milk and cream in my coffee and tea. Never could stand green tea, which is taste crappy with milk anyway, so I never got the benefit of green tea because I just plain didn't like it.

I also wonder about flawed experimental design and therefore results, conclusions, and discussions, and reproducibility, all very critical parts of a study, if investigators do not differentiate and treat as a variable and recording conditional controls over whether milk proteins are involved in the consumption of the coffee. If they don't make this discrimination, and at the very least don't report the existence of dairy protein in the trial, it is very possible, in fact perhaps even likely, that not only will the results appear to be variable when they are not, but there is no systematic ability to determine freedom from flawed experimental designs, are you going to detecting when a design is flawed, because of the lack of reporting of all ingredients and all conditions as part of the data. Which also points to not only flawed investigation and experimental design, but flawed peer review. Actually very very serious stuff. I've said before probably ad nauseum about interpreting and consuming research as being its own particular trained skill, not to be taken casually.

So now I make darn sure that my first cup of coffee is brewed and large and black and dense, with sugar. If I don't want to contemplate having too dense, I have it anyway and I just pretend I'm Italian or Turkish. I'm just pretend on him in a mafia movie and having a demi-tasse, and enjoying it in that fashion, only instead of one I am having five. Then I wait before having anything to do with protein of any kind, and especially dairy. After good half hour or longer I will then entertain milk if I feel like having milk to answer that creamy milky craving. But always at least one cup first is sans protein and then wait at least a half hour. Actually a half an hour on either end, no cream cheese with my bagel, no eggs or meat, blah blah blah. And if I tend to eat a healthy breakfast, then it's at least an hour. But since I'm not really a breakfast person usually first thing I do I have is coffee, a most happy addiction.

Anyway... Drink up, so many horrible diseases involve at some stage, and sometimes at every stage, oxidative stress on damage inside the cell, outside the cell, inside your mitochondria, interrupting your DNA sequencing, all that. So there's no time that isn't the best time to start even at this late stage! Because it can always get worse. As Marty Feldman once said, "Could be worse...could be rainin'."

[pdpatient in reply to MarionP]

Excellent commentary and advice. Thanks Marion.

[SAGoodman]

PDPatient I guess I should count myself lucky, as I've been drinking coffee since I was 5 years old, and didn't start having parky problems until 2018. Thinking I may have got PD a lot sooner in life without my coffee!! ☕️☕️💕

[PDGal4]

Addressing this study only, it was conducted on individuals with ASIAN GENE VARIANTS linked to Parkinson's disease. Not saying previous correlations with caffeine as protective aren't of value, but one was conducted on a very specific population.