Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon talks to us today about the effects of coffee following a discovery by a team of French researchers: changes in gene activity in many types of brain cells.
franceinfo: Researchers Have Found Caffeine Is Much More Powerful Than We Thought: It Alters Our Brains
Mathilde Fontez: Yes: caffeine has an impact on the expression of genes in our neurons. This is the discovery of a French team, led by neuroscientist Isabel Paiva, at the University of Strasbourg. This is obviously far from being the first study on the effects of coffee: it has been measured on humans – but also on mice, bees – that regular consumption modifies behavior, attention skills, , learning… But there, we discover a deep mechanism, which modifies the brain durably.
Our neurons are modified by coffee?
Rather our synapses in fact to be precise, the connections which connect the neurons between them, and which transmit information. The study was done on mice: the researchers submitted them for two weeks to a regular, rather moderate consumption of caffeine – much lower than mine if we compare… but I’m not the only one: coffee is is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world. The researchers looked at the hippocampus of coffee-drinking mice, the seat of memory and attention, and compared it to that of mice that only drank water.
And what they saw is that regular consumption of caffeine modifies the proteins that are produced by neurons: they counted 179 different proteins whose production is modified. Some are produced in greater quantities, others less, especially in synapses. And that lastingly modifies the circulation of information in the brain: the researchers observed that these proteins are still disturbed 2 weeks after the last drop of coffee.
Does that explain the effects of coffee?
This partly explains them, and above all it shows that they are very powerful: The researchers speak of a double effect: when the brain of a caffeine addict is at rest, it spins a little in slow motion: the neurons s fall asleep under the influence of coffee. And the other effect is that suddenly, they are much more reactive as soon as they are called upon: during learning, for example, they develop their synapses more efficiently to encode new information.