Tag: caffeine

Categories : General Interest Mental HealthTags :

Rough Night? Perhaps Skip the Coffee, Study Suggests

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Depending on coffee to get through the day after a night of poor sleep isn’t always the answer, suggests a new study from Michigan State University.

Researchers from MSU’s Sleep and Learning Lab, led by psychology associate professor Kimberly Fenn, assessed the effectiveness of caffeine in counteracting the negative effects of sleep deprivation on cognition. It turned out that caffeine only helps up to a point.

The study assessed the impact of caffeine following a night of sleep deprivation. The study recruited over 275 participants who were asked to complete a simple attention task as well as a more challenging ‘placekeeping’ task where tasks had to be completed in a specific order without skipping or repeating steps.

Asst Prof Fenn’s study is the first to investigate the effect of caffeine on placekeeping after a period of sleep deprivation.

“We found that sleep deprivation impaired performance on both types of tasks and that having caffeine helped people successfully achieve the easier task,”  said Asst Prof Fenn. “However, it had little effect on performance on the placekeeping task for most participants.”

She added: “Caffeine may improve the ability to stay awake and attend to a task, but it doesn’t do much to prevent the sort of procedural errors that can cause things like medical mistakes and car accidents.”

The US population has a pervasive lack of sleep, a problem that has intensified during the pandemic, Asst Prof Fenn said. Having inadequated sleep impacts not only cognition and mood, but can eventually weaken immunity.

“Caffeine increases energy, reduces sleepiness and can even improve mood, but it absolutely does not replace a full night of sleep, Fenn said. “Although people may feel as if they can combat sleep deprivation with caffeine, their performance on higher-level tasks will likely still be impaired. This is one of the reasons why sleep deprivation can be so dangerous.”

Asst Prof Fenn said that the study has theoretical and practical implications.

“If we had found that caffeine significantly reduced procedural errors under conditions of sleep deprivation, this would have broad implications for individuals who must perform high stakes procedures with insufficient sleep, like surgeons, pilots and police officers,” she concluded. “Instead, our findings underscore the importance of prioritising sleep.”

The study can be found online.

Source: Michigan State University

Categories : PaediatricsTags :

Caffeine Shown to Alter Brain Pathways in Utero

On By ModernMedia

Caffeine consumption during pregnancy could change key brain pathways, resulting in children having significant behavioural problems in later life. 

“These are sort of small effects and it’s not causing horrendous psychiatric conditions, but it is causing minimal but noticeable behavioural issues that should make us consider long term effects of caffeine intake during pregnancy,” said John Foxe, PhD, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience. “I suppose the outcome of this study will be a recommendation that any caffeine during pregnancy is probably not such a good idea.” Foxe also pointed out that this was a retrospective study, reliant on mothers’ recall of caffeine consumption.

Studies had already linked caffeine to other outcomes, such as a meta-review which found a nearly linear link between caffeine consumption and low birth weight. It is known that foetuses do not possess the enzyme necessary to break down caffeine, which crosses the placenta into the foetal bloodstream.

Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) analysed brain scans of thousands of children. The researchers observed increased behavioural and attention problems along with hyperactivity in these children. They observed distinct changes in how the white matter tracks (which connect brain regions) were organised in children of mothers who reported caffeine consumption during pregnancy.

“What makes this unique is that we have a biological pathway that looks different when you consume caffeine through pregnancy,” said first author Zachary Christensen, an MD/PhD candidate in the Medical Science Training Program. “Previous studies have shown that children perform differently on IQ tests, or they have different psychopathology, but that could also be related to demographics, so it’s hard to parse that out until you have something like a biomarker. This gives us a place to start future research to try to learn exactly when the change is occurring in the brain.”

At this stage it is not known what the relationship between amounts of caffeine are, or what effects arise in each trimester.

“Current clinical guidelines already suggest limiting caffeine intake during pregnancy—no more than two normal cups of coffee a day,” added Christensen. “In the long term, we hope to develop better guidance for mothers, but in the meantime, they should ask their doctor as concerns arise.”

Source: Medical Xpress

Journal information: Zachary P. Christensen et al, Caffeine exposure in utero is associated with structural brain alterations and deleterious neurocognitive outcomes in 9–10 year old children, Neuropharmacology (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropharm.2021.108479