Older women drink more coffee can delay memory decline

French researchers said Saturday that drinking more than three cups of coffee a day can help older women prevent age-related memory loss, a study that will give women all the more reason to like the world's most popular drink.

But they said: "Men do not enjoy the benefits of memory." "the more coffee older women drink, the greater the benefit seems to be," Kreich, of France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research, said in the journal Neurology. "

The researchers followed more than 7000 men and women living in three French cities.

They found that if older women drink more than three cups of coffee a day or get the same amount of caffeine from tea, most of their non-verbal memory (including visual memory) can be maintained for more than four years.

Compared with women who drank only one cup of coffee a day or less, coffee drinkers were 33 per cent less likely to have a decline in non-verbal memory and 18 per cent less likely to have visual and spatial memory loss. In addition, the memory-friendly benefits of coffee are also related to age, with women over the age of 80 getting more benefits from coffee than women aged 65 to 70.