Drinking coffee regularly has the ability to prevent an involuntary eye spasm called blepharospasm, according to a new study appearing in the online edition of the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.
Blepharospasm is a condition that causes people to blink in an uncontrolled manner and can render them blind as well. The current study involved 166 patients suffering from primary late onset blepharospasm. Researchers opted to have two control groups for the study; one group of 228 patients was suffering from hemifacial spasm, while the other group of 187 people was healthy relatives of the patients.
Hemifacial spasm is a condition that also begins in the eye muscles, but spreads to involve the whole face later on. The participants were recruited from five Italian hospitals. They were asked questions on their coffee consumption, smoking and the length of time they had smoked.
The University of Bari team found that drinking just one to two cups of coffee a day was able to confer protection against late onset blepharospasm. Additionally coffee consumption also helped delay the onset of the spasm by an average of 1.7 years.
"Our findings raise doubt about the association of smoking and blepharospasm but strongly suggest coffee as a protective factor," the authors write. "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."
