Coffee consumption may influence the hippocampal volume in young women

Perlaki, Gábor and Orsi, Gergely and Kovács, Norbert and Schwarcz, Attila and Pap, Z. and Kalmár, Zsuzsanna and Plózer, Enikő and Csathó, Árpád and Gábriel, Róbert and Komoly, Sámuel and Janszky, József Vladimír (2011) Coffee consumption may influence the hippocampal volume in young women. BRAIN IMAGING AND BEHAVIOR, 5 (4). pp. 274-284. ISSN 1931-7557

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Abstract

Caffeine is the most often used psychoactive substance. Caffeine may influence neuroplasticity in ani- mals. We investigated the relationship between caffeine intake (coffee consumption) and brain morphology. Forty- five healthy, non-smoking women aged 19 – 30 were included in the present study. We used semi-automatic user-independent MR volumetry and voxel-based mor- phometry. We investigated the relationship between caffeine intake (coffee consumption) and the volumes of the cortical brain structures where caffeine is supposed to act. We found that high-level and low-level caffeine intake was associated with a larger hippocampus compared to moderate-level caffeine intake. The other brain structures showed no association with coffee consumption or caffeine intake. The U-shape association between caffeine concentration and its effect has already been described in some experimental studies. To our knowledge this is one of the very first studies, which tries to find an association between brain morphology and coffee consumption or caffeine intake in humans using MR imaging.

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