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 The Starbucks-goers have one more reason to be thankful for their daily cup'pa joe: A recent study showed that daily intake of one or two cups of coffee will help in preventing blepharospasm, or a severe involuntary twitching of the eye that causes blindness in extreme cases.
Italy's Department of Neurological and Psychiatric Sciences University had Professor Giovanni Defazio and his colleagues study the smoking and drinking habits of blepharospasm patients. They were surprised with the results: while smoking doesn't have any significant association with the illness, drinking coffee seems to help in alleviating the eye condition. Said Professor Defazio:
Our findings raise doubt about the association of smoking and blepharospasm but strongly suggest coffee as a protective factor. The most obvious candidate for the protective effect is caffeine, but the low frequency of decaffeinated coffee intake in Italy prevented us from examining the effects of caffeine on blepharospasm.
He then explained that caffeine may play a major role in blocking the receptors in the brain that causes involuntary tremors or twitching; and also added that caffeine also had a similar protective effect in Parkinson's disease.
All of us experience eye twitching from time to time - when our eyes get tired after too much reading or prolonged use of the computer, we may feel our eyelids twitch for a bit, and may last for a few seconds. People with blepharospasm, however, suffer from uncontrollable twitching of the eyelid, and most people suffering from it resort to clamping their eyes shut, making them blind.
The first symptoms include eye irritation and discomfort, sensitivity to light and increased blinking. It usually affects people from ages 50 to 70. Professor David Wong of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists said that the condition is rare, but when someone has contracted the illness, it may get very severe indeed. "Sometimes the condition is so bad that the patients spend most of the time with their eyes closed - they are effectively then visually impaired."
Professor Kailash Bhatia agrees that known incidents of blepharospasm are rare, but only because it is underreported.
This is an interesting finding, if you knew exactly how this worked it would help to develop treatments or preventive measures...It's something to look at in more detail.
Dr. Tom Warner of Dystonia Society however, asks for a larger, more in depth study of the disease before anybody gets the wrong idea.
Whilst the data is fascinating and offers new areas of research, it should not be accepted as a proven association and certainly does not mean we should be addressing our coffee intake.
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