True confession. I am a coffee lover. Ever since my college days, I learned to love coffee. I was too poor to afford cream or sugar in those days so I drank it black.

Looking back, I had terrible coffee habits when studying for exams. Some nights I would drink up to 10 cups cramming for exams. Now I know, neither cramming nor high consumption of caffeine are good for you. But there was a coffee culture in school. Keeping the pot going all night while a group of us studied was how we managed our exams.

During those college days, I didn’t consider that too much coffee might not be a good idea until I started feeling jittery and anxious. Then, I knew, time to cut back because it was affecting me. However, I didn’t know exactly what the high consumption was doing to me.

A new study in Nutritional Neuroscience looks at what happens when we drink coffee in excess. The old saying, moderation in all things might apply here.

Coffee is one of the most highly consumed non-alcoholic drinks we have. And it’s highly popular. As most of you know, coffee contains caffeine, a stimulant of the central nervous system. And you have probably read about studies that say coffee has benefit due to its antioxidants. But its not that simple. Too much of a good thing might be too much!

So researchers decided to study habitual coffee drinkers to see if their habit affected brain volume or put people at risk for dementia or stroke. Basically, researchers wanted to know if coffee affected the brain in a negative way – a coffee on your brain type of study. Keep in mind that their focus was on high consumption levels-6 or more cups of coffee a day.

Researchers looked at data from the UK Biobank, and did what is called a long-term prospective epidemiologic study that included more than 500,000 participants aged 37 to 73 years. That is a large study! They also looked at disease outcomes in order to see if there was an association between high coffee consumption with stroke and dementia.

What they found was that  brain volume gray matter decreased. This is important because brain volume is tied to a healthy brain. You want more, not less. Furthermore, the higher the coffee consumption, the higher the risk was for dementia, but not stroke. In fact, they found a 53% increased risk of dementia in those who drank 6 cups or more of coffee compared to those who had 1 or 2 cups.

Now, there are a lot of factors not accounted for–alcohol consumption, diet, past or present smoking and more. But the take away seems to take a pause. Drinking 6 or cups of coffee a day might not be a good idea. Maybe  wisdom says it is time to cut back. For all of us coffee lovers, moderation again seems to be key!