Coffee, tea consumption habits may protect you from stroke, dementia

The habit of drinking coffee or tea can lead to a lower risk of stroke and dementia. The large scale study observed 365,000 people of the age group 50-74 for over 10 years.

The UK Biobank study asked participants to self-report how much coffee or tea they drank. Only 5,079 of the subjects developed dementia and 10,053 of them had at least one stroke. In general, 10% of global deaths are caused by stroke. And 130 million of the global population is anticipated to have dementia by 2050, reported The Guardian.

Research by Yuan Zhang and a team from Tianjin Medical University, China found that people who consumed two or three cups of coffee or three to five cups of tea in a day had the lowest risk of stroke and dementia. People who drank a combination of four to six cups of coffee and tea also had similar results.

However, scientists observed that the UK Biobank has a relatively healthy sample of people when compared to the general population of the world. The study published in the journal Plos Medicine noted that participants who drank two to three cups of coffee and two to three cups of tea daily had a 32% lower risk of stroke. They also were at a 28% of lower risk of dementia.

Prof Tara Spires-Jones, the UK Dementia Research Institute programme lead and deputy director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, told The Guardian that the study is "interesting" and "robustly conducted". She was not associated with the research and insisted that more work is needed to understand the link between the beverages and the risk of stroke or dementia.

Prof Kevin McConway, an emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, observed that the low risk of stroke and dementia was not influenced by the consumption of beverages.

He noted that the risk of both diseases was lower in people who drank reasonably small amounts of coffee or tea when compared to those who did not drink the beverages at all. He added that the risk of stroke and dementia increases once the coffee consumption gets to seven or eight cups. The risk of stroke is much higher in those people.