Prenatal Caffeine Doesn't Raise Risk of Problem Behavior in Kids

Whether a child exhibits problem behaviors at age 5 has nothing to do with a mother’s intake of caffeine during pregnancy, said a report in the August Pediatrics. Researchers led by Eva Loomans, M.Sc., of the Department of Psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, asked 8,202 women about their consumption of coffee, caffeinated tea, and cola at 16 weeks into their pregnancies. Then, when their children were age 5, parents and teachers rated overall problem behavior and problems with emotions, conduct, hyperactivity/inattention, and peer relationships, as well as prosocial behavior.

After adjusting for potentially confounding demographic, psychological, and medical factors, the researchers found that, “Caffeine intake was not associated with a higher risk for behavior problems or with suboptimal prosocial behavior.” Those results indicate that pregnant women should not be advised to reduce their caffeine intake solely to prevent behavior problems in their children.

To read more about prenatal risks, see Psychiatric News here.

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Depression Risk Drops as Caffeine Consumption Grows

Caffeine has been associated with both positive and negative health effects, but a new study of the link between caffeine and depression adds an intriguing entry on the positive side of the ledger.

A decade-long prospective study shows that depression risk decreases as coffee consumption increases, report Harvard researchers in the September 26 Archives of Internal Medicine. They studied coffee drinking in 50,739 women in the U.S. who had a mean age of 63 and were depression-free at baseline in 1996. They noted that while caffeine is "the world's most frequently ingested psychoactive substance," few studies have shed light on its link to depression. To assess whether a substance in coffee other than caffeine may be at the root of the association, the researchers also questioned participants about drinking decaffeinated coffee, but no relationship with depression rates was found for decaf consumption. The more caffeinated coffee the participants drank, the lower their risk of eventually developing depression.

To read about a possible link between chocolate—another widely consumed caffeine-containing treat—and depression, see Psychiatric News at http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/45/11/14.1.full.

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Is Caffeine Consumption Linked to Pediatric Depression?

Do depressed children self-medicate with soda? A group of researchers in Brazil have reported data that suggest that depressed children consume more caffeine than nondepressed children, primarily in the form of sugary soft drinks. They looked at 51 children aged 9 to 12 who were assessed for depressive symptoms with the Children's Depression Inventory and whose eating habits were assessed with the Nutrition-Behavior Inventory. The children were compared with control children who did not have psychopathology in a Brazilian city.

“We cannot determine whether the high consumption of caffeine in our study population was actually ‘causing’ depression or if high consumption was used to relieve some symptoms of depression,” the researchers wrote in their report, published online August 25 in BMC Pediatrics. “It is possible that children meeting diagnostic criteria for major depression use caffeine to ‘self-medicate’ to ease the symptoms associated with depression.”

Depression in children can also be closely related to symptoms of depression in their mothers. Learn more about this complex interaction in Psychiatric News at http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/46/7/13.1.full. Also read much more about childhood depression in American Psychiatric Publishing's Concise Guide to Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Fourth Edition. Ordering information is available at www.appi.org/SearchCenter/Pages/SearchDetail.aspx?ItemId=62416.

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High Stress Plus Caffeine: A Recipe for Psychosis Risk?

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Add stress to high daily caffeine intake, and what do you get? Hallucinatory symptoms possibly, according to Australian researchers. They grouped 92 community-recruited individuals free of psychiatric or neurological history, psychotropic medication use, and auditory impairment by self-reported stress levels and caffeine intake. Participants were asked to listen to white noise and to report each time they heard the song “White Christmas” during the white noise. Since the song was never played, each time a participant indicated they heard the song was recorded as a “false alarm.” All of the participants thought they heard the song being played, but those in the high stress-high caffeine group had the most false alarms.

The researchers concluded that increased caffeine consumption, in the presence of high levels of stress, has the potential to increase the experience of psychotic symptoms, specifically auditory hallucinations. The report was published in Personality and Individual Differences.

For more information about predictions of who may or may not be at a high risk for psychosis, see Psychiatric News at http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/46/10/18.1.full.