Now THIS is promising: https://studyfinds.org/3-cups-of-coffee-diseases/
UK Biobank is the biobank every -omics and related person in pharma/biotech (and academia) loves to use. Many drug discovery projects (and ultimately drugs in the clinic and market) are at least to some part associated with this patient database. At the same time many correlations turned out to have no causation and led to many unsuccessful approaches. This paper just shows that there might be a correlation between a certain amount of caffein intake and CM but there is no rationale about a possible causation.
All true. I hope you think this means the study holds some promise.
The next step for this Chinese group would be to identify a mechanistic rationale why caffeine could have a positive impact on CM, e.g. identifying a potential target(s)/receptor(s) which binds to caffeine and show its impact, e.g. agonist vs antagonist etc. There problem in this case is most likely that a) often way too expensive for academic labs, b) CM is a too broad disease spectrum and would need to more specifically defined, c) caffeine binds to a significant number of receptors (adenosine etc.) so it might be tough to really nail down a mechanism. But it would be great if they would start such work because if they ever come up with a mechanism it could be an interesting target to develop CVD drugs
Once again, all true. Hopeful?
For this specific study around caffeine ? - No (unlikely to yield anything valuable towards drugs against CVD)
It reminds me of curcumin (major component of turmeric) which is legendary in pharma/biotech to be positively correlated to many, many diseases in academia for the last 20+ years but no target could be identified and curcumin in clinical studies hasn’t shown any benefits against a number of tested diseases
My brief glimpse at the article suggested coffee is correlated with reduced CM risk, not caffeine. Maybe I missed the details?
Coffee has a lot more than just caffeine.
I assume people drinking 3 cups of tea or eating chocolate or drinking “energy drinks,” all of which also have significant caffeine, did not demonstrate a health benefit.
Maybe it’s something in the coffee that’s not caffeine alone, or not caffeine at all?
Maybe the benefit is correlative, as in 3-cup-a-day coffee drinkers exercise more often, or have a lower BMI?
Maybe it’s noise?
It does make me feel better about drinking coffee though.
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Sure. Even without proving causality (and without large, repeated, independent and meta studies across decades), it’s hopeful.
There may be a compound like cafestrol at work, which has its own correlation to Parkinson’s.
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