BLOG: Data support OCD, ‘obsessive coffee drinking’
To start with, and to reduce the stress of suspense, I wish to clarify that “OCD” in this post does not denote obsessive compulsive disorder, but rather obsessive coffee drinking.
In a post in 2018, I confessed that I had a coffee addiction. I described how the OCD acronym came about during a teaching session with our MSU second-year medical students. We were discussing a topic in a psychiatry session, and we talked about addiction. I shared with the students my heavy coffee drinking — to the extent of physical addiction to coffee.
And, honestly, I do not know where this acronym OCD (obsessive coffee drinking) came from or who first coined it. As we speak, when I searched the term in Google, I did not find OCD denoting obsessive coffee drinking. However, in the 2018 post, I included a picture from the break room of our clinic, which depicted our coffee maker. On the coffee maker, someone had pasted a small poster that read: OCD, Obsessive Coffee Drinking.
So, regardless of the individual who had invented the coffee version of the OCD acronym (with all due credit), let us call this medical condition, caffeine addiction, “OCD syndrome” for the purpose of this discussion.
Since the earlier post, I have been wanting to write another post about coffee. Almost every month or so, I come across a study about the health benefits of coffee. I am yet to encounter a negative study, to my reassurance given my OCD syndrome.
After the most recent study about the benefits of coffee, I could not let go. I found myself obliged to write this post, part 2 of the OCD syndrome.
This intriguing study was undertaken by Maria Picó-Pérez and colleagues from the University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, Braga, Portugal, who stated in the abstract that “habitual coffee consumers justify their life choices by arguing that they become more alert and increase motor and cognitive performance and efficiency, but that these subjective impressions still do not have a neurobiological correlation.”
Therefore, the investigators utilized functional MRI (fMRI) to study the changes in different parts of the brain after drinking coffee. They recruited 47 healthy adults who reported drinking a minimum of one cup of coffee per day. The study involved abstaining from drinking any caffeinated beverages for 3 hours and then drinking a cup of coffee. To evaluate if all expected positive mood and cognitive benefits are due to caffeine per se, 36 additional matched habitual coffee drinkers were recruited, and instead of coffee, they drank hot water with added caffeine.
Interestingly, the group that drank coffee reported more mood benefits after drinking coffee compared with pure caffeine. The findings in the fMRI were correlated, as they wrote in the study abstract: “Coffee consumption decreased connectivity of the posterior default mode network (DMN) and between the somatosensory/motor networks and the prefrontal cortex, while the connectivity in nodes of the higher visual and the right executive control network (RECN) is increased after drinking coffee; data also show that caffeine intake only replicated the impact of coffee on the posterior DMN, thus disentangling the neurochemical effects of caffeine from the experience of having a coffee.”
The investigators thus noted that, perhaps for the first time, the common positive mood and cognitive changes from coffee drinking have a scientific basis as confirmed by fMRI. They concluded that the positive brain benefits of coffee drinking are not purely from caffeine, but rather from the overall experience of drinking coffee, ie, perhaps from the overall expected effects from drinking coffee.
This study has made my day when it comes to my own OCD syndrome.
Reference:
- Picó-Pérez M, et al. Front Behav Neurosci. 2023. doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2023.1176382.
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