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Coffee and Health
News Articles & More on Your Health
Coffee and Depression:
Coffee as an Antidepressant?

When you grab that morning cup of java, you’re probably
not thinking of it as an antidepressant. You’re just trying to get that morning
pick me up to get your day going.
However, recent studies have shown that java really does function as an
antidepressant, raising the spirits of people who regularly drink the stuff. It
acts on the central nervous system and has mild antidepressant effects.
Coffee and depression studies have found that drinking coffee reduced the rate
of suicide in the large demographic populations observed.
The first coffee and depression study that raised the topic of java as an
antidepressant was done in 1993. In this study, a Kaiser Permanente Medical Care
Program study of 128,934 nurses found that java drinkers were significantly less
likely to commit suicide than nondrinkers.
This Nurse’s Health Study on coffee and depression did not go so far as to
establish a causal relationship between java drinking and the drop in the
suicide rate. The study stated that it could be that the coffee itself had
little to do with it, but that people who drink coffee share other
characteristics that make them less likely to commit suicide.
A second study on coffee and depression,
however, confirmed these controversial findings and went farther as to state
that it was the coffee that dropped the suicide rate. This study was especially
noteworthy, as it was large-scale and adjusted for a wide range of other
factors.
Published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 1996, the study followed more
than 86,000 registered nurses in the United States between 34 and 59 years of
age for ten years. Dr. Ichiro Kawachi, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical
School who led this study, looked at the data from the Kaiser Permanente study
hoping to discount their findings.
Instead of what he expected to find, he confirmed the original study’s results
with his own: using coffee as an antidepressant reduced the suicide rate in
these nurses.
Dr. Kawachi discovered that the nurses he studied who drank two to three cups of
coffee a day were one-third less likely to commit suicide as those who didn't
drink any.
The nurses who drank more than four cups a day were 58% less likely to commit
suicide than their colleagues who drank less. The coffee and depression study of
female nurses found eleven suicides among those who drank two to three cups of
caffeinated coffee per day, compared with twenty-one cases of suicide among
those who said they almost never drank coffee.
However, Dr. Kawachi and others aren’t ready yet to use coffee as an
antidepressant for clinical depression. At the minimum, Dr. Kawachi says that
his study shows that drinking lots of coffee can’t be bad for your health.
Psychiatrists point out that people must understand that depression isn’t simply
a state of mind; it is a very serious medical issue that cannot be resolved
simply by drinking coffee.
And cardiologists, while they recommend to their patients with heart and other
health problems to steer clear of caffeine, know that it’s not good for a
patient’s mental health to do so immediately in a cold turkey manner. Instead,
they recommend bringing down the coffee consumption gradually in order to avoid
a severe state of depression due to the drop in caffeine and other
antidepressants in coffee.
Whether it is the caffeine or something else, coffee does seem to have at least
a mild antidepressant effect. The caffeine in coffee may have mood-elevating
actions through effects on neurotransmitters such as dopamine and acetylcholine.
It is also possible that coffee drinking has social effects, such as increasing
personal contacts and time spent socializing, that might reduce thoughts of
suicide.
Article Source: Randy Wilson

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