Do You Need Another Reason to Drink Coffee?

A new study suggests that you can have your cake and eat it too -or at least, have your caffeine and protect your brain from damaging dietary cholesterol.

The report shows that caffeine counters the negative influences that high cholesterol can have on the brain without changing the blood cholesterol levels. Giving rabbits a high cholesterol diet in addition to caffeine (equivalent to one cup of coffee a day), researchers at the University of North Dakota tested the hypothesis that “chronic ingestion of caffeine protects against high cholesterol diet-induced disruptions of the blood brain barrier” in their recent Journal of Neuroinflammation publication.

Previous studies indicate that caffeine protects the brain from neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. What makes this study interesting is that it provides a mechanism for the protective effects. High dietary cholesterol compromises the blood brain barrier (a network of cells that line small blood vessels to impede damaging compounds circulating in the blood stream).

The authors point out that the finding has two therapeutic implications. One being that caffeine consumption may be used as a treatment for brain diseases by itself. The other is that withholding caffeine might facilitate the entry of other medications into the brain.

So what is caffeine doing to prevent cholesterol induced breakdown of the blood brain barrier? It blocks reduction of specialized proteins that join cells together. In other words, caffeine sustains the proteins that physically bind one cell to the next.

Another interesting caveat is that increasing the caffeine dosage (by ten) did not change the effect. However, to achieve protection the dosage did need to be “chronic”. So take comfort when having your daily cup of coffee.

The image above (from Fig 1 of the sited paper) shows that when caffeine is present, cholesterol-induced blood brain barrier damage is prevented. The brown splotches are areas reactive to blood factors that seep into the brain following leakage.

Xuesong Chen, Jeremy W. Gawryluk, John F. Wagener, Othman Ghribi and Jonathan D. Geiger, Caffeine blocks disruption of blood brain barrier in a rabbit model of Alzheimer's disease, Journal of Neuroinflammation 2008, 5:12 doi:10.1186/1742-2094-5-12