Can drinking coffee really give you a good memory?

Dr. Ritchie's research published in the American Journal of Neurology shows that drinking more than three cups of coffee or tea a day can help older women retain their memories.

Dr Ritchie and others of the French National Center for Health and Medical Research completed the new study. They asked about 7000 elderly men and women with an average age of 74 in Bordeaux, Dijon and Montpellier how many cups of coffee and tea they drank every day. The subjects took a number of mental skills tests, including a series of word memory tests, repeated in the second and fourth years.

The results show that older women who drink more than three cups of coffee or tea a day have fewer test scores than older women who drink one cup of coffee or tea a day; the biggest benefit is that women's oral memory; coffee does not seem to affect women's risk of dementia, which may be because the study time is too short to show such benefits.

Dr. Ritchie and others also noticed that coffee is not good for men's multi-year mental skills test scores. They believe that coffee helps women remember, perhaps because women are more sensitive to caffeine.