Daily caffeine intake temporarily alters your brain structure - Big Think

Neuropsych — January 27, 2023 Compared to people who took a placebo, the brains of those who took caffeine pills had a temporarily smaller gray matter volume.

Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, consumed by billions of people every day in the form of tea, coffee, and energy drinks.

That’s the question Yu-Shiuan Lin of the University of Basel and her colleagues set out to answer, and their hypothesis was that daily caffeine intake alters gray matter structure by disrupting sleep.

Their results — which were based on a neuroimaging study and published in the journal Cerebral Cortex — show that, indeed, coffee temporarily reduces gray matter volume.

After each 10-day period,the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine the participants’ brain structure and electroencephalography (EEG) to record their sleep patterns.

The current study is limited by its small sample size, and by the fact that the cerebral blood flow measurements and structural imaging were performed about three hours apart.