Is it suitable for drinking coffee during adolescence? Swiss scientists have research.

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Many Hong Kong people often have to stay up late, go to work during the day, open OT at night, and do homework, further studies or TV dramas after work. Therefore, we often drink one or two cups of coffee in the morning to refresh ourselves. Although we all know that coffee contains caffeine that we are addicted to, we don't know exactly what effect this stimulus has on the brains of developing young people. Earlier, I saw an article published in Su Weilin's left Keyan magazine that in order to solve this mystery, a group of scientists funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation did a study.

Because experiments on humans are inhumane, scientists usually use another organism to simulate the human response. In this study, Professor Hubet and his team used 28 male rats. In both rats and humans, the number of sudden contacts (junctions between cells) of brain cells increases from infancy to the peak of puberty, after which the brain removes unwanted synapses and the number of fingers decreases. The decline in the number of synapses is an important indicator of brain growth, because it can remove the cluttered and redundant synapses and improve efficiency.

The team assessed a third indicator of brain growth: exploratory behavior, synaptic density of old cells and slow-wave sleep activity. As the rat matures, his behavior of exploring new things increases, indicating that he is increasingly interested in new things, and synaptic density decreases as a result of simplification and removal, meaning that an activated old cell has less place to convey signals. In addition, the reduction of signal transmission points will also reduce the activity of slow wave sleep.

Five days after puberty, rats consumed caffeine from drinking water, about the same amount as humans drank three or four cups of coffee a day, and compared the test results with non-caffeinated mice. To measure the exploratory behavior of the mice, the scientists gave them a new object, gave them the freedom to explore, and then recorded the length of time they explored. In terms of synaptic density, Professor Huber dissected several of the rats and then stained a synaptic-specific protein to observe the location and density of synapses in the brain. In addition, the scientists inserted electrodes into the brains of rats to measure their sleep slow waves.

The results were significant: all three tests showed that caffeine caused the brain to develop more slowly than normal rats, and the synaptic density and sleep slow-wave activity of caffeine-fed rats did not decrease more slowly with age. and exploratory behavior is weak.

You might ask, what does the first experiment on rats have to do with us? Although this study alone cannot fully determine how caffeine affects and slows down the development of the brain, because the pattern of brain development in humans is very similar to that in mice, we have reason to believe that Professor Huber's findings will reflect similar results in the human brain. To sum up, caffeine affects the brain development of adolescence, a critical period associated with the development of mental illness.