This new study confirms “the potential of caffeine (…) to treat an orphan neurological disease”, summarizes in a press release the Institut du Cerveau, an organization that participated in this work with Inserm and the hospitals of Paris ( AP-HP).
The study, published Tuesday in the neurology journal Movement Disorders, sought to confirm early isolated data on the effectiveness of coffee against movement disorders, known as “dyskinesia”, which are linked to a gene called ADCY5.
Extremely rare but very debilitating, this pathology results in many uncontrolled movements, with no known treatment to date.
But three years ago, French doctors, including neurologists Emmanuel Flamand-Roze and Aurélie Méneret, noticed a possible positive effect of caffeine in a young patient.
This discovery made by chance – the 11-year-old child had consumed normal coffee then, inadvertently, decaffeinated, the latter serving as a placebo – however, only concerned an isolated case and therefore had to be confirmed.
To do this, Ms. Méneret and Mr. Flamand-Roze examined data from 30 patients of all ages who had consumed caffeine.
In the end, a large majority (26) of them recorded an improvement in their symptoms after taking caffeine, although three others observed a deterioration instead.
In the majority of patients, including children, caffeine was otherwise well tolerated.
“This study supports the hypothesis (…) of a beneficial effect of caffeine on patients with ADCY5-related dyskinesia”, conclude the authors.
This work was certainly carried out on a limited sample and, above all, retrospectively, therefore without being able to establish a direct cause and effect link, in particular by comparing the effects of caffeine with a placebo.
But these limits are inherent in the rare and serious nature of the disease in question, as the researchers point out.
“Given the rarity of ADCY5-related dyskinesia and the fact that caffeine is a major part of daily life, it is extremely difficult to conduct a classic randomized study” with placebo, explain the authors.