a cup of coffee may relieve some symptoms of a rare disease

It is a genetic disease, the dyskinesia, without treatment so far, which affects several hundred people worldwide. It is manifested by tremors of the head, legs and arms. A clinical trial conducted by a team from the Brain Institute and Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris has just confirmed that drinking coffee every day, in these patients, reduces tremors in 87% of cases. Caffeine is indeed fixed in the brain and comes to correct the dysfunctions related to the genetic mutation.

The story of this discovery is very original because three years ago this same team of researchers had already had the intuition that caffeine could be effective. Doctors then prescribed two cups of coffee a day to an 11-year-old patient. Indeed, his tremors had almost disappeared. He could walk and write again and it was a thoughtlessness that allowed the experiment to be validated scientifically because one day the child’s mother made a mistake. She bought decaffeinated pods, says Professor Emmanuel Flamand-Roze, neurologist at Pitié-Salpêtrière. The tremors have returned to the child.

Unwittingly, the mother had just carried out a clinical trial with a placebo. This error has paradoxically confirmed the intuition of scientists on the effectiveness of caffeine. This led to this new clinical trial with 30 patients this time, the results of which have just been published. These results therefore indicate that coffee consumption should be recommended as a first-line treatment for patients suffering from this dyskinesia with the ADCY5 gene mutation.

These are not the only clinical trials conducted with coffee. Various research works have shown a beneficial effect of coffee: on the prevention of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, but also neurodegenerative diseases (such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s). The stimulating action of caffeine can indeed promote memorization, and act on cognitive decline. Be careful not to exceed four cups a day.