Cognitive Labs

Recently we covered the story that caffeine can help block skin cancer and that topical caffeine solutions might be just around the corner.

Actually, they are here, according to dermatologist Leslie Baumann's blog.

Caffeine can also reduce the appearance of facial ruddiness or rosacea, Baumann says.

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University of Washington professor Paul Ngheim has found that moderate consumption of caffeine reduced the impact of ultraviolet rays on exposed skin.

In the lab, caffeine seems to cause UV damaged cells to literally hit a figurative self-destruct button, like the climax of a typical mad scientist film, while letting normal, undamaged cells move along and go about their business unharmed.

There is even the possibility of adding caffeine to sunblock, so one could purchase a grande, SPF 50 lotion. More...

"ATR is essential to damaged cells that are growing rapidly, Nghiem said, and caffeine specifically targets damaged cells that can become cancerous. Caffeine more than doubles the number of damaged cells that will die normally after a given dose of UV," he remarked.

"This is a biological mechanism that explains what we have been seeing for many years from the oral intake of caffeine," he added.

The findings were published online Feb. 26 in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

But, Nghiem added, people shouldn't increase the amount of coffee or tea they drink to prevent skin cancer. "You are talking a lot of cups for a lot of years for a relatively small effect," he said. "But if you like it, it's another reason to drink it."

Nghiem has also been experimenting with applying caffeine directly to the skin. "It suppresses skin cancer development by as much as 72 percent in mice, and human studies are moving ahead slowly," he said.

It's possible that topical caffeine preparations might one day be used to help prevent skin cancer, Nghiem said. "Caffeine is both a sunscreen and it deletes damaged cells," he said. "It may well make sense to put it into a sunscreen preparation."

Dr. Robin Ashinoff, a dermatologist and clinical associate professor of dermatology at New York University's Langone Medical Center, cautioned that these findings need to be verified before they can have any clinical application.

"This study tells me that caffeine may be a useful ingredient topically to remove ultraviolet-genetically damaged cells from reproducing," Ashinoff said. "This may help prevent the development of skin cancer."

This new treatment could be enjoyed even by members of the new Star Trek movie, where the good news is that they've gone back to the 1960's "jammie" style of uniform (now in production)



Paramount photo

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Howard Schultz must be having kittens.

Another paper appeared today documenting reduced risk of cognitive impairment in middle-aged people who drank between 3 and 5 cups of coffee per day.

"Middle-aged people who drank between three and five cups of coffee a day lowered their risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer's disease by between 60 and 65 per cent later in life," said Miia Kivipelto, a professor at the University of Kuopio in Finland and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Other research (University of North Dakota) has shown that in rabbits, the blood brain barrier was kept intact when the rabbits were given the caffeine equivalent of one cup of coffee per day even when their diet was high in cholesterol. The scientists surmised that caffeine has a blocking effect on the absorption of potentially toxic material through the blood brain barrier.

In another study we covered earlier, caffeine was shown to accelerate the speed of transfer between neurotransmitters, increasing cognitive effectiveness and inter-neural reaction.

Gene expression was also improved simply through sniffing the aroma of coffee.

Too much caffeine though, and you might become like Timothy Leary and start hallucinating. So, like in all things, proper proportionality is required. The happy wo/man has some pleasure from her/his cup of java, but not too much, as too much violates Nature (in the Stoic sense).

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The rich latte, double decaf with a twist, americano, or hand-picked, massaged, rinsed, organic, towel-dried super-premium ecophreak blend may alter the activity of some genes in the brain, reducing the effects of sleep deprivation, even if you don't imbibe the liquid.

As LiveScience reports, coffee has been a part of the human diet for more than 1,000 years, and is now the most widely consumed beverage worldwide.

Scientists have conducted numerous studies that investigate both the beneficial and adverse effects that coffee can have on health, from the antioxidants it possesses to the possible detriments of too much caffeine. Much of coffee's lift has been attributed to its caffeine content.

Dr. Han-Seok Seo and colleagues at Seoul National University allowed lab rats, some of which were stressed by sleep deprivation, to inhale the aroma of coffee. The researchers then compared the expression of certain genes and proteins in the rats' brains. Some of the genes expressed in the coffee-sniffing, stressed rats expressed proteins that have healthful antioxidant properties known to protect nerve cells from stress-related damage. Their stressed out counterparts who weren't allowed to smell coffee didn't show these gene expressions.

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