This may be the best alternative to your favorite coffee, green or herbal teas.
Espresso Might Do More Than Just Wake You Up… it can keep Alzheimer’s at bay by preventing tau aggregation and stabilizing structures in the brain, says a new study.
Espresso, savored alone or as an ingredient in beverages such as lattes, Americanos, or even martinis, delivers a potent burst of caffeine to aficionados of the drink. However, its benefits may extend beyond its stimulating properties.
According to a study published in the ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, laboratory experiments have shown that compounds found in espresso may inhibit the aggregation of tau proteins—a phenomenon implicated in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
Approximately half of all Americans consume coffee daily, and espresso serves as a favored method. The process of creating espresso, known as “pulling a shot,” involves the pressure-driven extraction of finely ground coffee beans with hot water, resulting in a concentrated blend.
This extract frequently serves as the foundation for various beverages, including the fashionable espresso martini. Recent studies have hinted that coffee might hold protective effects against specific neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease. While the precise triggers of these diseases remain ambiguous, the tau protein is suspected of being crucial.
In healthy individuals, tau proteins provide stability to structures in the brain, but in the presence of certain diseases, these proteins can aggregate into fibrils. The hypothesis is that preventing this clustering could mitigate symptoms. Therefore, Mariapina D’Onofrio and her team set out to determine if espresso compounds could inhibit tau aggregation in a laboratory setting.
The team obtained espresso shots from commercially available coffee beans and analyzed their chemical composition using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. They decided to focus on caffeine and trigonelline, both alkaloids, along with genistein, a flavonoid, and theobromine, also found in chocolate, in subsequent experiments.
These selected molecules, together with the total espresso extract, were incubated with a truncated form of the tau protein for up to 40 hours. As the concentration of the espresso extract, caffeine, or genistein rose, fibril lengths decreased, and they didn’t evolve into larger aggregates, with the full extract delivering the most remarkable results.
Smaller fibrils proved to be harmless to cells, and they didn’t act as catalysts for further aggregation.
In other tests, the team found that caffeine and the espresso extract could bind to already-formed tau fibrils.
Although these findings require additional research, the team is optimistic that their initial lab results could lead to the discovery or creation of other bioactive compounds to combat neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s.
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