By Sola Ogundipe
A new study has found that a cup of coffee may be doing far more for people with serious mental illness than simply jump-starting the morning; it has an astonishing association with slower biological aging.
Researchers say the discovery could reshape how people think about one of the world’s most consumed beverages.
The findings, presented in BMJ Mental Health, with a rather striking headline: a consumption of three to four cups of coffee daily can have the cells of individuals suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or psychotic depression biologically younger by as much as five years.
Inside every human cell sits a quiet ticking clock: telomeres, the protective caps on chromosomes that slowly shorten with age. For people with severe mental illness, that clock ticks faster. Their telomeres shorten prematurely to mirror a biological age up to 15 years older than the general population.
But in the Norwegian study of 436 adults, something unexpected emerged. As researchers plotted telomere length against coffee intake, a dramatic curve appeared — an inverted J. Telomeres grew longer as coffee intake rose, peaking at three to four cups daily, then shortening again with heavier consumption. The sweet spot was clear.
“This suggests that drinking coffee up until a certain amount is potentially adapting to keep biological aging in check. But coffee isn’t just ‘good or bad’; we need a balanced view, and a lot more studies to confirm this is a causal effect,” said Monica Aas, PhD, senior author of the paper from King’s College London.
Individuals who drank three to four cups a day had telomere lengths equivalent to five years less cellular wear-and-tear compared with non–coffee drinkers. That’s a remarkable biological benefit in an already life-expectancy-burdened population.
And the pattern held steady regardless of whether participants were living with schizophrenia or affective disorders, or whether they were men or women.
The finding is tantalizing, but it comes wrapped in caution tape.
Scientists had to depend on self-reported coffee consumption; there is no differentiation between instant or filtered, strong or weak brews, nor caffeine from other sources. There’s also no information regarding any possible mediators of inflammation or oxidative stress that could help explain how coffee might protect telomeres. And, of course, coffee itself is a chemical universe.
“This study adds to emerging debate around the benefits of coffee and its myriad bioactive compounds. We should not consider coffee as a single substance. We don’t know which of its compounds were responsible, in what amounts, or how much of them reached the bloodstream,” said Elizabeth Akam, PhD, of Loughborough University.
The study also identified a potential hazard of overindulgence. Beyond the four-cup point, telomere length fell again, reinforcing more general cautions on high caffeine consumption-from disrupted sleep to an uptick in physiological stress.
Since individuals with severe mental illness are prone to high intakes of coffee, the findings from our study indicate a potential health benefit through being mindful of intake of coffee consumption, decreasing consumption beyond the recommended daily dose. The authors thus wrote.
By linking coffee to everything from cardiovascular health to longevity, this study introduces a new question into an already heated global debate: Could coffee also become a tool in narrowing the gap in life expectancy linked to severe mental illness?
For now, researchers are calling for caution — and curiosity. The findings, they say, are striking but far from final. It’s only the long-term, detailed studies that follow both the compounds in coffee and human biological markers that can prove this brew truly delays the clock.
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