November 14, 2000

2 min read

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Coffee's Ties to Parkinson's

By Kate Wong

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People who drink lots of coffee may be less likely to develop Parkinson's disease (PD), according to a study published today in the journal Neurology. But before you race off to refill your mug, consider this: the coffee itself may not be conferring resistance.

Neurologist Walter Rocca of the Mayo Clinic and his colleagues studied 196 people with the disease and 196 without it. Intriguingly, whereas 83 percent of Parkinson's patients were regular coffee drinkers, 92 percent of the control group made java part of their routine. Similarly, 21 percent of those with the disease drank four or more cups per day; 37 percent did so in the control group. And among those participants with PD, those who drank coffee developed the disease eight years later than those who did not. Furthermore, the researchers found that alcoholics and people who used chewing tobacco and snuff were also less likely to develop PD. (The team also tested the purported inverse association between cigarette smoking and Parkinson's and failed to detect a correlation.)

Taking those results into consideration, the team suspects that the coffee itself is not protecting against Parkinson's (although they have not ruled out that possibility). Rather, they suggest, it may be that people who suffer from PD manifest a certain personality early in life that leads them to avoid using unhealthy or addictive substances such as tobacco, alcohol and coffee. Indeed, individuals who later develop PD are sometimes described as moralistic, conscientious, cautious and orderly, the team reports. "These personality traits can be combined into the concept of 'reduced novelty seeking'," they write. "Novelty-seeking behavior has been linked to substance abuse and addiction and in turn has been found to be less common in PD cases than in control subjects."

Kate Wong is an award-winning science writer and senior editor for features at Scientific American, where she has focused on evolution, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology and animal behavior. She is fascinated by human origins, which she has covered for nearly 30 years. Recently she has become obsessed with birds. Her reporting has taken her to caves in France and Croatia that Neandertals once called home to the shores of Kenya’s Lake Turkana in search of the oldest stone tools in the world, as well as to Madagascar on an expedition to unearth ancient mammals and dinosaurs, the icy waters of Antarctica, where humpback whales feast on krill, and a “Big Day” race around the state of Connecticut to find as many bird species as possible in 24 hours. Wong is co-author, with Donald Johanson, of Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. She holds a bachelor of science degree in biological anthropology and zoology from the University of Michigan. Follow her on Bluesky @katewong.bsky.social

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