Could Used Coffee Grounds Protect Brain Cells?

A new study out of UT El Paso has discovered that a substance derived from spent coffee grounds has the potential to prevent neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Because I often write about science and health, I get a ton of emails from university PR departments announcing this new study or that. Most of it is interesting, some of it is groundbreaking, but this morning it was so, well, grounds-breaking that I opened my inbox and gasped. Spent coffee grounds can protect the brain from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s Diseases, wait what what what? PLEASE: DO TELL ME MORE.

See, here’s the problem with the current state of neurodegenerative disease research: much of it is focused on palliative, symptom-reducing drugs to help patients after the onset of the disease. In other words, the pharmaceutical industry keeps asking itself how can they create a pill that will make diseases such as Alzheimer’s progress more slowly or become less virulent, once diagnosed. How might they remove the plaques and tangles that are already there, once the degeneration of neurons is already well underway?

Whoever invents this holy grail of a drug, they know, will become rich. And they spend millions of dollars on marketing drugs that have turned out to have been complete duds. I have firsthand knowledge of this insanity because many years ago, to put my two older kids through college, I took a job at a marketing firm that was tasked with bringing one of those dud drugs to market. The amount of time and effort we put into hyping what turned out to be not only snake oil but snake oil that could lead to bleeding in the brain was both staggering and, in retrospect, shameful. But everyone drank the KoolAid because the pharmaceutical company paid their bills on time, and they assured us of the drug’s efficacy with fancy PowerPoint slides.

Meanwhile, over at University of Texas at El Paso, Jyotish Kumar, a doctoral student in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, was busy messing around with cheap coffee grounds with funding from NIH. What he discovered is that those spent coffee grounds may hold the key to keeping neurons in the brain from degenerating in the first place.